


Lines

by pprfaith



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Attempt at Humor, BBC Typical Heartbreak, Buffy Insert, Buffy in Space, Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Companion Buffy, Connected Vignettes, Drabble Fic, F/M, Ficlets, Flashbacks, Fluff, Gore, Historical, How Do I Tag, Immortal Buffy, Immortality, Lists, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Pre-COE, Religious Imagery, Season 1, Season 2, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, Violence, Well - Freeform, Well What passes for it in the Who Verse, What did i miss?, Why is this so much fun?, old story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 01:29:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 66,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10426212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: 2009 summary:Life and death, laughter and tears, joy and grief. It's all connected. A Buffy-in-space story.2017 summary:Buffy in space with the Doctor, Buffy in Cardiff with Jack, and a hell of a lot of time between them all.Originally posted in 80 separate vignettes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is sort of the oldest story I have that I actually like. Most of the stuff before this one is just to make me cry. Past self was way too into drama. 2009 self was still into too-flowery prose, but I can tell where I was sort of developing my own style and I like that. Also, the plot twist i did is kind of cool, or so I'd like to think. 
> 
> Enjoy.
> 
> (The art was made by someone awesome, although I don't remember who. Sorry about that.)

+

**Space I**

+

She didn’t sleep as much as she had used to anymore, almost like the universe was spiting her, taking away her last reprieve from time. How many times had she considered pulling a Lestat and sleeping for a century or two? And every time she’d failed in the initial phase – falling asleep. 

In the early days, she hadn’t minded so much. In the beginning just being off Earth, travelling through time and space, had been exiting enough to make her not notice how little she was sleeping. Working for the Time Agency, all the more or less to-rule fun she’d had. It had been distracting.

But then the Agency started going downhill and she had spent more and more time staying away until one day, she hadn’t returned at all. It was for the better.

When she’d met the Doctor, there had been more awe and action. Now, years into being a companion to the lonely Time Lord, the excitement had waned off, leaving long hours in the TARDIS and not enough action for someone used to fighting to the death every night. 

So Buffy spent a lot of time in her room on the ship, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what dreaming felt like. She could feel the TARDIS humming underneath her, could hear the Doctor’s messy whirlwind thoughts outside the door, caught snatches and glimpses of the worlds and times they passed, her mind reaching and stretching through time, up and down an endless line of dead girls. 

Human sacrifice was, the Doctor said, crude, but an effective source of power. Power that flowed in her veins, like time flowed in his. A gift, a curse, an inevitability. Like so many things in this universe.

And then she fell asleep. 

Fell asleep and remembered how to dream like one remembers riding a bike – easily, effortlessly. She remembered and dreamed and the Doctor – in all his big eared, hook nosed glory - bent over her sleeping form and poked her in the side.

“Wake up,” he ordered, “Work to do.”

She glared balefully at him with one eye and said, “Not yet. We have to wait.”

He sat next to her, his expression thoughtful, trying to remember something he knew he should never have forgotten. “Wait for what? You already had coffee.”

“No,” she corrected him, “I haven’t. And triangles have three sides.”

He looked surprised, standing quickly, hand held out to her. “Are you sure?”

She took the hand and he pulled her to her feet with too much momentum, causing her to stumble into him. “Yes,” she said, getting annoyed, “Don’t they teach you anything back on Gallic Free?”

He opened his mouth, ready to correct her mispronunciation of his home planet’s name yet again when her eyes grew wide and she stepped past him into the bright desert sun. The sand felt hot under her bare toes. Where had her shoes gone?

She looked around, vaguely aware of the Doctor behind her, asking, “Where are we?”

The high rocks, the endless dunes, occasional shrubs here and there, a black shadow flitting in and out of sight, women singing in the wind – “Home,” she told him and turned to smile at him.

He frowned, “I thought Home was that way?” 

And he pointed to the left, where the desert melted into a star sparkling night of eternal indigo, planets burning, suns bursting. A whole universe, just above the horizon. Buffy shrugged.

“Maybe.”

“What’s that then?” He pointed again, this time with a thumb hooked over his shoulder and her gaze followed dutifully. Behind him, a bank of mist and fog obscured what lay beyond, making it impossible to guess at shapes and colours. A lost world. An undiscovered world. The third world.

She shrugged and offered, “He hasn’t moved in yet.”

Again, the Doctor looked at her quizzically, “Who is he?”

Buffy felt her own frown settling on her face as confusion crawled inside of her. Who was he?

At her feet, a small whirlwind picked up sand, beating it against her calves and ankles in tiny pinpricks and she found herself crouching down, running her hand across the ground in a soothing manner. The whirlwind dissipated and she sat down, motioning for the Doctor to sit next to her.

“Thanks,” he declined, “but I’ll stand. It doesn’t like me much.”

“Nonsense,” she complained and pulled him down like he had pulled her up – without a chance to resist. He landed in a disgraceful heap, spitting sand, glaring. She giggled. 

“I like it better over there. Less dirt,” he remarked as he finally settled down. Her gaze followed his almost automatically, landing on the murky border between desert and space. She looked at the inky darkness of time flying by, bringing with it dying stars and newborn suns, and back down to the sand at her feet, merciless and hard to some, but always warm, always soft to her. 

The lines between the two worlds were blurry and soft, interweaving in places, like lovers holding hands. 

Unlike the other world, hidden in the mist, unreachable for either of the two beings sitting in the sand.

Who was beyond?

The answer came out of the fog. 

_The third side._

Then she woke.

+

+

**Cry**

+

She arrived the way people tended to arrive at the Hub – suddenly, unexpectedly and completely and utterly inevitably. 

She arrived when Ianto was still silent and red-eyed, when Gwen still avoided looking at Jack and the curses and screams of the past week still echoed in the lower levels of the Hub. Came when those damning words - _You’re the biggest monster of all!_ \- still rang in everyone’s ears like some horrible, demented mantra and Jack was the only one pretending nothing had happened.

She came marching through the rolling door with a sway to her hips and bounce in her step that no-one inside echoed. They were all still broken, still hollowed by a dying girlfriend hidden in the basement and a leader who could aim a gun at someone’s head and order them – no hitch in his voice, not the tiniest one – to kill the one they loved. 

When the door closed behind her, Owen’s gun was aimed steadily at her head, Toshiko was staring wide-eyed and Gwen was just going for her own weapon. Ianto hadn’t moved at all, probably hadn’t even noticed anything amiss. He was living in his head, in a loop of endless cyberwomangirlfriendslaughterhateandtears. He hadn’t spoken a word to Jack since then. 

She stopped in the doorway, just behind the bars and blinked at them, slowly, languidly, as if wondering what kind of insect they were. When Owen barked a question at her, she just smiled. 

And then Jack – not in shining armour – came, arms spread like some messiah, telling them, “Guns down, kids.” And then he said, “This is Buffy.”

Buffy - the new Second in Command. Which made Owen angry because that was his job, but not really because before him it was Suzie’s and before Suzie, it was Buffy’s. So it was really her job all along, apparently. She pecked Jack on the lips and touched him like an old lover was wont to do, treated him like she knew him inside out which, after the week they had had, seemed less than likely.

Within half an hour she had Tosh convinced that she’d be a good friend to have and Gwen found herself giving in too, taking a liking to the strange blonde girl who knew Jack and in some ways, was so like him. They shared the same energy, the same restless, manic energy that discharged through chatter and flirting, through laughter and jokes and a weird sense of humour. And underneath there was the same hollowness, the same barely covered desperation and pain. They carried themselves the same way, looked at the world through identical eyes. Eyes that showed you what you expected to see – a flirty glint, a spark of humour, a glint of steel – but faded to a blank slate as soon as no-one was around.

All the hallmarks, Torchwood was learning, of someone who’d seen too much to be quite human anymore. 

But after seven days of oppressive, lethal silence, any sound was welcome. Anything at all that covered the silence of Ianto and the nothing’s-wrong of Jack, covered the echoes in the basement. There were still bloodstains down by the water but every time Gwen wanted to show Ianto – it was his job after all, to keep things neat – she realized that that would be asking him to _clean up his girlfriend_. She vowed to get rid of the stains herself. Just as soon as she felt completely sane again. 

“Jack,” she finally chirped – Buffy that was –, “Where’s that kid you been telling me about?”

That kid. Gwen couldn’t help looking confused. What kid – oh. Ianto. Why would a newcomer ask about Ianto?

“Buffy.” Clear warning in Jack’s voice - _let it go, drop it, let the dead stay buried_.

But Buffy, blonde, bubbly Buffy, was the kind of person to pick at a scab until it bleed, the kind perhaps, to nag and poke just to see how you would react, how long it would take for you to lose it and scream, just scream. Not out of any evil intent, or scientific interest, but because she couldn’t help herself. 

She raised a hand, wagged a finger at Captain Jack Harkness and said, “Oh no. You don’t get to drag me off a Caribbean beach in 2123 and then not tell me what’s wrong.”

But even as she spoke, Buffy turned to the rest of the team, sitting on the Captain’s desk, leaning on her hands, as if she knew better than to expect an answer from the man she had posed the question to. Owen felt compelled to answer instead and said, as Owen was likely to do, “He made Ianto kill his girlfriend.”

If he had expected outrage he was sorely disappointed when the blonde merely raised an eyebrow and turned back to the man in question. Jack sighed, rubbed a hand over his face in an uncharacteristic sign of fatigue – but then how would they know if it was really uncharacteristic, for all they knew he did it all the time and they knew nothing about him, so there – and bit out, “She was a Cyberman and he was hiding her in the basement. She got loose and tried to kill us. And I did not make him kill her.”

Form anyone else it would have sounded like an excuse, a justification. From Jack, mysterious, jaunty Jack, it was a mere statement, facts, nothing more. Let the chips fall where they may, and the blame, too. Gwen was learning that such things did not seem to concern him at all. He did what he did and damn all else. 

_We are what we are._

“But you tried to make him do it,” Owen supplied, willing, oh so willing, to lay the blame where he thought it belonged, willing to condemn and hate and absolve. Willing perhaps, to judge where the rest of them shied away. Owen, too, had an uncanny talent to pick at flaws and scabs until the blood flowed freely. 

“You make a mess,” Jack answered, “You clean it up.”

He lowered himself into his chair and turned to paperwork, silently indicating that the conversation was over. Tosh got the hint and dragged the dear doctor outside with her, trailed by an aimless Gwen who lingered beyond the door, within earshot and out of sight.

Inside the office long silence reigned until – “Jack?”

“He lied to me.” Four small words, so simple, so heavy. _He lied to me_. An explanation perhaps, for everything that had been said and done that night, for all the rage, the order – _ten minutes then I will kill you both_ \- for the tiredness that echoed in the words even now. For the first time since learning of Jack’s apparent immortality, Gwen wondered just how old he was. He sounded a thousand years gone. 

“He was trying to save her, wasn’t he?” A jump in logic, yes, but Gwen got the impression that Jack and Buffy and Buffy and Jack and whatever they were together were not built on logic, were not built on anything but each other and a nebulous past that tied them together in ways no-one understood.

“Yes.”

“He was scared.”

“Yes.”

“And so were you.”

The silence stretched, stretched and mutated, grew and flowed out of the room, filling Gwen’s mouth with stuffy, thick air, leaving her feeling… lost. 

Then, “Yes.”

There were things, small things, that one person should not know about another. Things that needed to be kept secret for the sanity of all, for any peace of mind and soul. For the sake of judgement. There was black and there was white, Jack had done wrong and Ianto had not, but suddenly, with a single word, a single simple word, Jack had turned from black to grey and now there was no wrong anymore. There were only two dead girls and a room in the basement that still echoed with pain and blood, a man who had forgotten how to smile, and another, who whispered secret confessions in his dark, hollow office. 

More so than at any point over the last few days, Gwen felt the need to find a corner and cry.

+

+

**Blur**

+

Ianto was not sure how, but suddenly Jack’s friend – he called her that in his head, so he wouldn’t get confused, to the lines would stay unblurred – stood in front of his desk at the tourist office and smiled at him in a way that reminded him of butterflies and Sunday picnics.

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

“You have only been here for a few hours,” he said, not defensively, but decisively. In a tone that suggested dropping the matter was in everyone’s best interest. All Ianto wanted was to cling to the numbness he had wrapped himself in, to stay hollow and cold, empty and silent. Everything, the mere idea of anything but hollow pain, made him sick with nausea and memories.

“Right-o. So, catch up time, Ianto Jones.”

And before he knew it – before he even registered her moving – she had her arm hooked into his and was pulling him out of the office into the early evening of Cardiff in the rain. With a grimace she launched into a detailed description of Californian weather as she pulled him along. 

He tried to free himself, to escape, but she was a living vine, a breathing rope, wrapping around his arm, his waist when he attempted to simply stop, around his mind. She was tearing at the numbness with every word she spoke in her high, childish voice, was dragging the darkness out of him. He looked behind him once, expecting to see shed skin left in their wake – skin pulled off, stripped from him, leaving him naked, raw - but there was nothing but wet pavement. 

And then they were suddenly inside a pub, where she shoved him into a secluded booth and said, “Stay.”

Her voice was sharp, a thing that would have stopped a rampaging Weevil in its tracks because the only answer – the only possible answer – to that voice, was obedience. 

Ianto obeyed.

She came back five minutes later with a tray balanced in one hand, placed it in the middle of the table and slid in next to him, cutting off his route of escape. She grabbed a frilly cocktail glass off the tray and shoved the rest in his direction – a beer and five shots of clear liquid.

He tried to convey with a silent glare that he refused to let her get him drunk, but she just smiled at him, smiled the same way Jack did when he was giving orders he expected to be _obeyed_. The kind of order he had given when… when Lisa…

He took the beer and gulped half the glass down in one go before the taste registered and he almost chocked.

“What is that?” he asked, voice raspy with unexpected fire.

“Specialty of mine. Beer with a schnapps, or two. Loosens you _right_ up.”

“I do not need to be loosened up.”

She looked at him then, her smile gone, eyes wide and flat, her face a blank slate waiting to be filled. “What have you been doing since she died?”

For a moment, there wasn’t enough air to breathe. Then Jack’s – Buffy, there really was no point to trying anymore, not when she seemed to very determined to rip Ianto into tiny sobbing pieces – Buffy reached out to steady the dangerously tilting pint and his mind – almost in pieces now, just a second from splintering, from falling apart forever – latched onto the first thing to cross his field of vision. Anything to let him forget about the question ringing in his ears, anything to pretend he was still the man he’d been seven days ago, when the world had still made sense. 

It was a wrist-strap, the brown leather soft with use and age, just like… Jack’s. Exactly like Jack’s, actually.

His fingers moved without his permission, mind still focused as hard as he could manage, and he touched the strange device gently. “The Captain,” - not Jack, at least not out loud, not ever again –, “has one just like it.”

She shrugged and leaned back after depositing his beer on the table and taking a sip of her own drink. “Yep. We used to work for the same… organization, for a while. This was standard equipment.”

“You worked together?”

She shook her head. “No. We worked for the same people, at different times. When Jack joined up, I was already more or less gone. Jack was their poster boy. Me, not so much. We met up again later, though.”

Silence stretched until a small part of Ianto’s mind – the part that had his mother’s lessons about manners still ringing in its ears, perhaps – said, “You should say something now.”

So he did. “I… Why did you bring me here?”

“Well, we’re a team now, aren’t we?” Lie. A sideways, not-even-trying-to-hide-it lie. 

“I don’t see the others here.” There it was, that unflappable Welsh coolness, the sharp tones and wry notes. Now if only he could hold on to it, cling to it. He might survive the night.

This time the ball was in her court and while Monster Silence grew and twisted on the bench between them, Ianto found himself finishing his beer and going for the first of the shots. He had spent a full week locked up inside his head, focusing on the little things, soldiering on – step after step, don’t falter now and by God, don’t stop, don’t ever stop for even a second because they’ll catch up with you, the screams and pleas and tears and then, and then – a full week entrenched in reality, fighting the memories. He didn’t have the strength to resist oblivion when it was offered to him like this. He wasn’t that man anymore.

“I had a boyfriend once. A long time before I got this,” she finally offered and waved her wrist strap in his face. Her tone was flat, her eyes sad. “And he… well, somewhere long the line he developed a taste for bleeding little girls dry. And I was the one who had to kill him.”

_Ten minutes to execute her._

“Did you?” Where had all the shots gone?

“Eventually, yes. But it took me months to work up the strength to do it and he wracked up a death toll that will stay with me forever. And afterwards… my name might just as well have been on the list of dead. There wasn’t much left of me. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see him, hear him – “

“Accusing you. Asking you why.”

“Yes.”

The bottom dropped away and the world tilted and suddenly there was only darkness. Only cold. And the lines, Ianto realized, those lines he had tried so hard to keep intact, were already blurred beyond recognition. No right and wrong anymore, only people stumbling through their lives, hoping for something better but never finding it.

“When I killed him, he was… the man I loved was gone. Your Lisa, was gone.”

“No.”

“You know that, Ianto. You hate it, but you know it. And you’ve got to let her go.”

“No.”

“You want to know why I brought you here?”

He looked at her, looked away, looked anywhere but at her. But he could still hear her. “I brought you here so you could get dead drunk and cry and scream and hate. I brought you here because… when I… when Angel died, no-one asked me how I was doing and it almost killed me. So here I am, asking. And you’re going to tell me. Because you have to.”

The next time the waitress passed their table, Buffy asked for a bottle of tequila and another cocktail.

“It’s gonna be a long night,” she said, more to herself than to him. This time, when the lines blurred, it was because of the tears rising in Ianto’s eyes.

+

+

**Watch**

+

When Buffy walked into the Hub the way she hadn’t in years, Jack’s heart stopped for just a few moments, just long enough to make him grateful he couldn’t die, long enough for him to remember a thousand other glimpses of her, on a thousand worlds, in a thousand situations. A thousand smiles and frowns on that never changing face, as ageless as his own.

He knew why she had come. Had known the moment it had happened – the moment the call had gone out, unwilling, unintentional, but still strong, fuelled by the power of desperation and longing. The moment Ianto had asked - _Haven’t you loved ever anyone, Jack?_ \- the answer had rung bright and clear in his head, an echo of a word that was so much more. 

_Buffy._

Buffy, Buffy, Buffybuffybuffy. A mantra in his head, a loved one gone, if not lost. He’d known the moment her name had clawed out of his memories that she would hear it, would feel it, wherever, whenever.

Before, Jack had kept joking with the Doctor, talking about how it was a bad idea to help Buffy along with her psychic abilities, because she already had an uncanny knack for knowing things that were supposed to be lost. But that horrible night, the night of tears and deaths and broken trust, he had been grateful, ridiculously grateful for the strange quirk that allowed her to hear his silent plea.

And she’d come. Like a whirlwind – which was what he loved about her, her energy and power, her life and passion and refusal to _ever give up_ \- she’d come and taken the Hub by storm, in a few short hours. 

It was how she always breezed back into his life. They split up, for one reason or another, stayed apart for a while, and found each other again and there was a storm, a gale, a Hurricane Buffy and his life got turned upside down. Not that he wasn’t likely to do the same to her – mind you, he was Captain Jack Harkness and he had just as much life and energy and passion, just as many easy smiles and flirtatious grins, just as much hyperactive desperation as she did – but that wasn’t the point. 

And then she dragged the story out of him in less time than it took to subdue Janet in a rage, and she _acted_. Gave him a stern look that told him she knew why he had done what he’d done and that she still wasn’t happy with it but not condemning him either – never her, no, she condemned no-one, always willing to keep soldiering on, to go on, to forgive, if not forget, never forget. In three hundred years, she had not forgotten one face or name, living or dead, not a single lost thing. Sometimes Jack wished he could at least have worse memory, that both of them could forget at least, if they had to live forever. 

After glaring him into submission she had taken Ianto and dragged him out. He watched via CCTV footage as she pulled the man out of the office and into the nearest pub. Watched as, three hours later, the two emerged again, this time decidedly different. Before Ianto had been dragging his feet, unwilling to follow anywhere any associate of Jack’s led. Now he was leaning heavily on the small blonde – so heavily in fact, that a normal woman her size would not a have stood a chance at holding him up. 

He was drunk. Drunk and limber, broken and patched back together in that special way Buffy had – offering you a piece of herself in exchange for something of you, never letting you notice that she was not taking but giving all the while, giving you solace, giving you peace, giving you a chance to just rage and cry for lost things, giving you everything you never knew to ask for – hollowed out and filled with soothing silence.

How many times had she done it to him, the great Captain Harkness? Had found him wherever he was hiding after another failed mission, another funeral, another love – brief as a falling star and just as bright, burning out so quickly – and made him pour his soul into her hands.

She never resented him for loving others, never blamed him, never hated him, only let him be. She was the most amazing person he had met in almost two hundred years, more amazing even than the Doctor. It just took longer to recognize her for what she was, to see the worth of her behind the ditzy routine and the bad puns. And it humbled him. 

It humbled him that someone as amazing and strong and wonderful as Buffy Summers Slayer would pick a man like him - lowly Captain Jack Harkness of the stolen names and stolen things - to spend her piece of forever with. 

Humbled him because there was nothing she couldn’t fix, nothing she wouldn’t give and without her, he would have been a colder man, a different man. 

But here he was, watching her drag his archivist home – where she would put him to bed, take off his shoes and tie, undress him and cover him in blankets, leaving painkillers and a trash can by his bedside – and he knew that if anyone could fix the broken man, it would be her. 

Knew that if anyone could fix the mess his life had become – this intricate mess of love and friendship, of trust and hope and need and duty – it was her. 

+

+

**Flood**

+

“She lives forever.” 

Their words echoed in the trees, carried on the wind, rode loose leaves to the ground, everywhere. Anywhere.

Jack clutched little Jasmine tighter even as she strained against his arms, her face alien and blank, too blank for any child her age, too blank for any human being. Gwen couldn’t look the girl in the face.

“Suppose we make her stay with us,” Jack asked into the trees.

More death, Jasmine said in her strange grown up voice, a promise of more bodies, more corpses. It froze Gwen’s heart, chilled her to the bone because children were supposed to be children and not this – not empty things, spiteful and bitter, broken by the world and filled with something so strange, so far beyond human it could only come from a time before man, a time of savage beauty and cruel deaths, a time of faeries.

“If they want to,” Jasmine said, chanting, almost, “they can make great storms, wild seas, turn the world to ice. Kill every living thing. Let – “

Cut off suddenly by a slight form in black and green, stepping in front of her, shielding her from those who wanted to take her. 

“But they can’t stand against us,” Buffy said quietly, so quietly her voice should not have been heard over the ruckus in the trees. But it was. And the certainty in it, the absolute _knowledge_ made Gwen freeze.

And then, silence. The cacophony, the twitter of wings and the shudder of leaves, the voices hissing to one another, it all fell silent. 

“Old One,” the faeries spoke in eerie unison, “The child, give us the child.”

“Why should I? You can’t take her from us.”

One of the green things strained forward on its branch, as if to reach out but it dared not. Straining with greed and need in its eyes, but not daring to come another inch closer.

“The child lives forever. With us. Chosen One. Give us the child.”

“She is human. She belongs in the human world. She is no Chosen One.”

“Our Chosen One. The child belongs with us.”

“Buffy,” Jack now, his voice low and urgent as the things in the trees became more agitated and the wind picked up again. “It’s not the same.”

She didn’t turn around, didn’t even look at him as she spoke, “It looks like it from where I’m standing.”

“But it’s not. We can’t keep her forever, you know that. Our word won’t hold them off for long.”

“They will obey us.” Harsh words and a small voice. Gwen was just confused at this point. What was going on? Were they letting Jasmine _go_?

“We are like you,” The fearies spoke again, “Come from the beginning of time. We have never harmed you. The child belongs with us.”

Jack shook his head unseen behind her and quietly spoke only to the blonde woman in front of him. Not to Gwen, not to Jasmine, not to the faeries. Only to her. “Buffy,” he half whispered, “She is what she is.”

There was a truth and depth to the words, something more than just a sequence of sound. Memory. Recollection. Jasmine struggled and Jack had to strain to keep her still. Buffy slumped visibly. 

“She won’t be harmed?”

“We told you, she lives forever.”

She turned and knelt in front of the girl, Jack by her side. With one small hand, she traced Jasmine’s face, as if committing it to memory. Maybe she was. “Promise me something, Jas.”

The child nodded earnestly, actually looking childish for the first time Gwen could remember. “Back in time, will you stay in your forest? Away from the desert? There are things there, dangerous things. They will kill you.”

She nodded and spoke with the voice of a hundred fluttering wings, “We will be safe, Old One. One day, there will be trees in the desert.”

Buffy chuckled quietly. “I know. Believe me, I know. When that happens, I’ll move out. You can have the desert then. It’s a deal.” She took a deep breath, “Now go.”

Jasmine nodded and turned to go before stopping, looking at Jack suddenly. She touched his face like Buffy had touched hers and leaned in to loudly whisper in his ear, “When the world is ended, you can stay with us. In the forest.”

Jack, tears in his eyes, smiled. “Thank you. Now go. Take her.”

And then Jasmine was gone, lost forever at the dawn of time in a forest that was nothing but illusion and memory and her mother came – screaming and hysteric, broken and breaking and beating on Jack before sobs took her over – and all Gwen could do was stand there, staring at the spot where the girl had turned to light and disappeared. 

+

Later, back at the Hub, Gwen found Jack sitting in his office, staring into space. She let herself in without knocking and stood in front of him patiently until he focused on her. 

“Why were those things afraid of Buffy?”

The Captain didn’t look surprised at the question, didn’t look hurried or scared. He stood instead, his eyes still flat and too blue, stood and walked around the desk to lean in low – too low for Gwen who was tired and sad and angry still, for having let the girl go.

“Are you sure you want to know?” He asked and the question underneath was this: _Are you sure you want to know what Buffy really is? What I am?_

She nodded.

“Even faeries don’t mess with Buffy. She’s kind of mean.”

She stepped sideways, away from him, both hands slamming on the desk with a resounding crack. “Tell me, Jack!” she barked.

“You don’t want to know,” he answered, voice still mild, still soft. Two weeks since Lisa and again he’d made a decision, again he’d turned against everything they stood for. Another one lost. Only this time, Buffy had been with him and she had made the same decision. It drove Gwen mad to know that they knew something she did not, that they could let a child go to her doom without protest. 

They had the means to keep her safe and still they’d let her go. _It’s not the same_ , Jack had said. The same as what? 

“Yes, I do.” Ground out between clenched teeth, aching with not knowing.

“No.” Harshness, finally, an order, the boss peeking through. No more nice Jack, playtime’s over. She backed off, hands raised and stormed past him out of the room. 

She was almost down the corridor when Jack’s voice – carried by the strange acoustics of the Hub, or perhaps by magic and secrets – reached her ears, softer than she’d ever heard him. Not meant for her at all. 

“I don’t even want to know.”

+

+

**Space II**

+

So this was the famous Doctor? Buffy scrunched her nose up cutely and took the man in. Not very tall, more or less bald, big eared, a giant nose and oh my, those were large hands. 

Still, he looked more like the kind of doctor you found in run down hospitals back in the twenty-first century. The kind wearing lab coats and running around with clip boards. Not the world saving, Time Lord kind of doctor.

She made a _hmpfh_ noise through her nose as she eyed the man like she intended to buy him. He did the same to her, despite the fact that he had no tall stories to measure her against.

The slayer finally broke the silence, “I thought you’d be taller.”

He cocked his head to one side and shrugged. So-so. “And who might you be? Time Agent.”

He added the last after a quick glance at her wrist and a badly covered up grimace. Someone was prejudiced. 

She returned his gaze levelly. “Former,” she corrected him, “I only joined up for the decoder ring.”

His look was blank. Buffy huffed. Didn’t anyone in this damn universe understand her puns anymore? Join the Time Agency, see new planets, meet new people, tell jokes no-one gets. It was the story of her life.

“And your name?” Here was someone used to being obeyed. So sure of himself, he was. Just like she had once been sure of herself. The arrogance of those who thought themselves infallible. 

She smirked a smirk that had once belonged to a blond vampire - stripped from his body, as had become her habit in this brave new world – and replied, “You can call me Slayer, Doctor.”

Eyebrow. “You know who I am.”

“Been following you around.”

His look of consternation clearly let her know that no, he hadn’t noticed that before. She might have sucked at silent and invisible as a teenager, but ten years spent lurking in the background, trying to fade into the walls after Sunnydale had taught her a thing or two. Her own so-called _friends_ had tended to forget she was there. No stranger would notice her unless she allowed them to. 

“How?”

He expected handy, blinking gadgets and dohickeys, she could tell. The ‘advanced races’ always did. Didn’t know what to think when she went by instinct and intuition and beat all their precious technology.

She held out a hand and he eyed it warily. She huffed, “It’s a hand. It won’t bite. Take it, and I’ll show you how I found you.”

“How do I know you won’t rip off my arm, _Slayer_?” 

Once upon a time, she would have tried to reassure the man. Now, she just smiled brightly and said, “You don’t.”

Slowly, he stepped forward, his gaze never leaving her face, watching for any indication of a trap. Well, he had lived to a ripe age, so he couldn’t be stupid. Good. Buffy didn’t do stupid and dependent. Not anymore. Not ever again. 

And then he gripped her hand.

Stars flared, energy flowed and aimless dreams and hunches became more, became a thread of silver light, stitching together through all of time and space, to this moment, this second, Doctor and Slayer, touching, interlocking, becoming more than the sum of their parts, growing, stretching, and the light, oh the light, suns burning and stars dying, dizzy and confused, upside down and birth after death, a jumbled mess of wheres and whens and hows and whos and they just _were_.

“I dreamed you,” Buffy whispered once they were both steady on their feet again. 

The Doctor let go of her hand, eagerly and reluctantly at the same time and simply said, “Oh.”

+

+

**Drift**

+

As the laughter of a bad joke trailed of, Jack was there suddenly, behind Buffy, his arms wrapped around her. She leaned back into him and kept on planning a shopping trip with Tosh because, apparently, “There’s nothing quite like twenty-first century fashion.”

Jack chuckled at that and buried his nose in her hair, breathing her in, committing her already familiar scent to memory. Just in case. It was always just in case with her and him, with them and anything they tried to keep. 

Tosh finally agreed on the time and place and turned back to her work – or at least pretended to. It seemed everyone inside the Hub – except Gwen who had stormed off – was watching them covertly. The two of them had, until then, never been obvious about what they were to each other. After almost two weeks of having the blonde in the Hub, the curiosity had to be unbearable. 

It made the Captain laugh and wrap his arms a bit tighter around the slight form in front of him. He didn’t really care what the team thought, not now that Buffy had successfully alienated them with the faerie business as well as he had with the Lisa business. 

On both occasions something beyond the usual jokes and grins had shone through and it had left the – in comparison painfully young – members of Torchwood feeling stranded because they didn’t understand. Why Jack had done what he’d done that night and why Buffy, who obviously had the power to keep Jasmine in this world, had let her go.

_Pick your battles, cut your losses, live to see another day and accept the inevitable._

All those were valuable lessons, lessons learned through pain and death and heartbreak. They could not be explained, could not be put into words. Of the four team members, Ianto was probably the one who understood most of it, but even he was what, twenty five? So young, so young still.

It made the bile rise in Jack’s throat to know that these people he employed - sent into danger and eventually, inevitably, watched die – were practically children. His children. And he kept failing them, kept scaring them, when all he wanted to do was wrap them up and keep them safe.

Having Buffy around helped because she was smoother somehow, more at ease with looking after people in ways that did not include weapons and fistfights. She was taking over as the mother hen of the group, getting Ianto to open up, bitching with Owen through his pissy moods, slowly injecting Tosh with more confidence and letting Gwen rant. She was making them all run like a well-oiled machine, without the usual kinks and chinks. 

If the slayer knew one thing, it was how to make a bunch of individuals into a fighting unit to frighten the dark. It was what she did after all and Jack had seen her have a go at all kinds of monsters while the Doctor stood back and commented on technique and inventiveness. It had seemed callous at first, to let a single little girl fight while the grand Doctor didn’t bother to get his hands dirty, but Jack learned eventually that that was what Buffy was all about. Fight. War. Death. In every possible way.

And that was okay. Here, now, with four humans to keep them grounded, with a mission to keep them focused, the two of them could be together, could be a team again, without drifting, without falling apart. When they were alone it was like the world fell away because between them time and space, physics and rules didn’t matter. It was only them and each other. Narcissus and his reflection in a grove far from human kind and all its things.

Torchwood kept them real.

But it also kept them busy. The alarm suddenly went off, followed by Tosh announcing, “Rift activity on Hope Street. The energy spike is small, but it seems that something living came through.”

As she spoke she was already typing away, trying to gather more data while Owen pulled up CCTV footage of the area and Ianto jogged upstairs to get the SUV. Jack tapped the earpiece he rarely went anywhere without and asked, “Gwen? You there? We got Rift activity.”

“Coming,” was her answer. “I’ll meet you upstairs.”

And then everyone was moving and coordinating and grabbing gear, doing their job with frightening efficiency and Buffy and Jack stood in the middle of it for a moment, two rocks in time, pillars, unmoving. Then Jack grabbed his coat from a nearby chair and sent his companion a smile that ended in a grimace.

“Once more into the breach,” he said with fake solemnity and threw Buffy her own coat.

She caught it one-handed and put it on with a swish and a swirl and responded in kind, “Miles to go before we sleep.”

“That’s all very nice,” Owen chirped in their ears, “But we’ve got an alien to catch, so save it for later.”

Buffy rolled her eyes and Jack grumbled something about the uses of being the boss when he still got ordered around like this and then they both jogged to catch up with the rest of the team and everything was as it always had been at Torchwood Three.

+

+

**Hunt**

+

“So, did I get that right?” Gwen demanded between puffs of air as she narrowly avoided crashing into a dumpster while taking a corner at breakneck speed, “This thing is a parasite that takes over dead bodies and reanimates them.”

“Yep,” Owen supplied, sounding surprisingly dry and amused, considering that they had been running at full speed for the past five minutes.

“It explains all the reports we got about zombie sightings,” Tosh chirped through the comm from where she was coordinating their hunt in the Hub. 

Jack threw his two cents in as well. “I had a boyfriend once that got infected. Run over by a landing spaceship. Came knocking on my door again two weeks later. Only time I ever turned him down.”

Every single team member cringed at the mental images Jack’s anecdote supplied them with. 

Everyone except Buffy who simply grunted as she put on a burst of speed and started closing in on the deceased Tom Green, who was running at amazing speeds, considering that his left leg had been mangled by the car accident that killed him. Gwen had a sudden flashback to the zombie movie Rhys had made her watch the week before. Eugh!

“Great,” Buffy snarled as she pulled a wicked looking knife out of nowhere, “Alien zombie vampires. Just what I need.”

+

+

**Gripe**

+

“Celebrate your own uniqueness,” Jack told Owen and left him to put up the tent. Bloody marvellous, it was, the whole team alone in the woods, camping. Owen was pretty sure he could be having more fun at an alien autopsy but no, camping it was. 

“This is _disgusting_!” he called to no-one in particular as he bent down to unzip the tent bag and start fumbling with the poles.

“Dirty,” Buffy supplied, suddenly appearing next to him and taking the poles from his hands.

“Smelly,” Owen agreed and went to retrieve tools from the SUV.

“Crawling with gods know what,” Buffy called after him, apparently as happy with their choice of weekend activity as the good doctor himself.

“Green,” he returned as he hefted a hammer and returned to the future tent.

“ _Alive_ ,” Buffy concluded their little game with a shudder of finality.

“Oh, for God’s sake, will you two put a sock in it? What is it with Buffy, doctors and bickering?”

“We weren’t bickering-“

“We were agreeing– “

“That we _hate_ \- “ that one actually came in stereo.

“The countryside.” Owen nodded decisively and Buffy stood on tip toe to peck Jack on the cheek.

It was going to be a _long_ couple of days.

+

“The countryside it nice, Owen,” Owen mimicked, voice high and grating.

“You can’t always stay in the city,” Buffy chimed in helpfully.

“Fresh air won’t kill you,” he added.

“But the cannibals might!”

Ianto grunted in agreement from where a paramedic was fussing over him and Toshiko nodded as much as her blinding headache would allow. Gwen was pretty much passed out from exhaustion inside an ambulance. Only Buffy and Owen seemed to have any energy left and they used to gripe about the past twenty-four hours.

“Countryside,” Owen said snidely, disgust evident in his voice.

“No,” his blonde colleague corrected, “Country _cide_ , ‘C’, not ‘S’.”

Jack was pretty sure he wouldn’t be hearing the end of that one anytime soon.

+

+

**Time I**

+

Buffy woke with a grinding headache that she just knew she was going to feel for days. She hated dying, she really, really did. And dying by Dalek? Give her a head shot any day. 

With a loud groan to make her displeasure known she sat up and immediately regretted it. Her stomach roiled, her world tilted and all she had time for before she was puking out her guts, was to lean forward so she at least didn’t vomit on herself. She coughed and spluttered for what felt like hours. 

When her stomach finally calmed down enough for her to think again, she became aware of a gentle pair of hands holding back her hair, supporting her. She tried to figure out who it was that was holding her, Jack, Rose, the Doctor? But the scent and feel of the person behind her, as well as the voice, were completely alien. So she forced her eyes open and made herself look at the man holding her.

Brown eyes, pointy face, wild hair. A complete stranger and yet… the feeling of him, the way he resonated inside her poor, abused head, was very familiar. 

“Doctor,” she ground out in a whisper, trying to keep her headache happy. “What a different face you have.”

“Yes, well. Are you good to sit up? You took quite a few blows.”

Blows? She had been exterminated by Daleks how many times? Four? Five? One time was bad enough, messing up every single molecule of her body. But this? She almost wished she could die again, just so the ouch would stop. 

But then memory finally kicked in and she remembered – throwing herself in front of the Doctor to take another blow, Rose gone, Jack somewhere far away, probably dead – what the hell had happened?

She looked around and found Rose sleeping not too far off. They were back in the TARDIS. Hadn’t that been gone, too? She searched for Jack’s frame in the circular room, but couldn’t find him. Surely even the Doctor would have taken the time to retrieve the body. At least that much.

“Where’s Jack?”

The Doctor patted her shoulder and helped her to her feet, holding on to her arm when she swooned a bit. It was sort of amazing, the way the two of them interacted. He changed bodies on her, she died on him, and they were both completely blasé about it. She giggled briefly, for once understanding perfectly why the combination of Slayer and Doctor had a tendency to freak Rose out, just a bit. 

Not Jack, though. Never Jack.

Jack.

“Where is he?” she asked, abruptly cured of the giggles. 

“Don’t worry. He’ll be fine.” 

She knew that tone of voice. It meant that the Doctor was using a different definition of fine than anyone else. “Where is he, Doc?”

“In the year 200,100, I would imagine.”

“And we are?”

“Not fiftieth century Barcelona. Drifting, mostly,” he added with a somewhat disappointed look at the sleeping Rose. He let go of her arm and tried to slip away but she wouldn’t let him. Oh, no, she wouldn’t let him.

“What. Happened?” It was the tone she used with Daleks before taking them apart, the tone reserved for people who were about to die, not because of anything she felt or wanted, but simply because they had to go. Detached. Cold. Ruthless.

The new Doctor made a face and then quickly rattled off, “Rose absorbed the Time Vortex, came back, killed the Daleks, brought Jack back to life and then forced me to Regenerate. End of story. I heard they have fantastic drinks on Barcelona, didn’t you?”

She had to steady herself again, but this time not for any physical reason. “Whoa. Hold on. _Brought Jack back to life?_ He died?”

“Yes,” came the glib response and Buffy set her jaw. 

People coming back from the dead? She knew how that ended. Hell, she was the end product. Either you were dead, or you weren’t. Being brought back, meant you weren’t. Ever. Again. Willow had brought her back and she’d watched the woman age and wither, still looking like the day she’d jumped off that tower. It was like there were only two settings – alive or not. Breaking the natural order of things meant you got stuck on one setting. In her case, the wrong one. If Rose had brought Jack back – 

She was glad, suddenly and madly, that there was someone else, someone like her. Someone who wouldn’t die, wouldn’t age, wouldn’t leave. The third she had seen walking beside her and the Doctor for years.

Her gift was Death and the Doctor’s was Time and now Jack, her crazy, jaunty Jack – 

“You left him there. Alone. Not knowing what was going on. You left him!”

“Yes.”

She punched him. It was quick, fast and efficient. A punch to the face said so much more than any tantrum she might have thrown. After all that time travelling with him, she would have thought he had learned something. Learned that he was not the only lonely thing out there. Apparently, he hadn’t because he had just left a newly created immortal being with no chance of _ever dying_ alone. 

Alone!

“We’re going back! Now.”

He ran a hand through his hair, sighed. “Buffy. You know that you give me headaches. And Jack… looking at him is all wrong. He has no shields whatsoever. Even the TARDIS bucked when he got close.”

“Oh,” she said, very calmly, “So you abandoned him because he gave you a _headache_?”

He had no answer to that and for once, wisely kept his mouth shut. 

“Take me back then. Take me back and run, if you want to, but I’m not leaving Jack alone. Not now. Not after what Rose did to him.”

“She didn’t mean to.” Quick to defend the other woman, as always. Quick to judge Jack, too. And her. She had never sat too well with him – Slayer, not Healer, not Helper, not anything but this, Slayer – Killer – but they had gotten used to each other the way two inevitabilities had to. Too used perhaps.

“ _They never do_!” She was yelling now and Rose was finally stirring, but she didn’t really care. She’d never wanted to share her curse. Of course she’d dreamed of it, but never - never - would she have wished it on anyone else.

She took a deep breath, centring herself. It was meant to happen. These things always were. For years now, she’d dreamed of the three of them, herself, the Doctor and a faceless third. Jack. It had been Jack all along, though the fog. 

Which meant there was nothing she could do to fix it. 

“Take me back,” she said in her most controlled voice. 

But she was sure as hell going to try.

+

+

**Confess**

+

It was long past midnight by the time Jack made it back to the Hub. He’d dropped all the team members off at their flats, made sure they would be alright, and made them promise to call, if anything – anything at all – happened. 

Tosh and Gwen should both have been in hospital but refused to go and Owen was shaken as hell, even if he refused to admit it. There would be nightmares for all of them.

And Ianto. When Jack had decided to take the archivist along on the trip, he’d been banking on an easy job. He had meant to get Ianto into the field, let him see some action and to perhaps give him a chance to bond with the team. Instead of bonding and an easy introduction to the world of alien hunting, the man had gotten the shit beaten out of him and almost eaten. 

If Jack had been prone to feeling guilty about things, this would have weighed heavy on him. As it was he just shook his head and told himself that there was nothing he could have done. Everyone was alive and safe. He’d done his best. 

Still, all he wanted as he entered the Hub, was to crawl into his bed and sleep. Sleep for a very long time. He left his coat on the couch as he passed it and made his way up the stairs to his office a lot more slowly than usual, the customary spring gone from his step. Tonight he felt every single of his two hundred and change years. 

He entered his office with his shirt already half undone, and froze. There was someone in the room. He turned slowly, carefully, hand going to his gun already. That was when he spotted Buffy.

She had cleaned the paperwork off his desk – probably done it while she was waiting for him – and was sitting cross legged smack dab at the center of the table, elbows on her knees, chin on her folded hands. 

“Buffy,” he greeted, wearily. He knew the look in her eyes and it meant that she wasn’t here for some post-danger-sex. It meant she was here to talk. 

“Jack,” she retorted, not moving an inch.

He continued as if he’d never been interrupted, pulling of his shirt, unbuckling his gun holster. 

“I dropped you at your apartment,” He finally said conversationally.

“You did. I showered, changed and came back here. Dropping the others and checking up on them took you a long time,” Buffy answered, in the same tone of voice. “I notice you didn’t check up on me.”

She’d finally found an apartment the week before and moved in right before their little camping trip. Jack remembered a promise to help her unpack once all her purchases had been delivered.

“I trust you to look after yourself. The others… not so much.”

She made a noise that could have been a yes as much as it could have been a no and finally got to the point. “You were fucking Ianto.”

Jack tucked in his chin, set his jaw and raised both eyebrows in an expression that everyone who knew him recognized to mean, oh _really_? 

“I was?” He asked, tone light and curious. _What do you want?_

Buffy was supposed to cross her arms, give him a stern look and snap at him. It was the way these things usually went when they were about to have a fight but this time she had come prepared and oh, how prepared. Instead of getting defensive she unfolded her hands and leaned back on them with a thin smile. Relaxed. Open. Refusing to fight. Damn.

“While Lisa was in the basement, you were fucking him.”

The Captain took a deep breath.

“It took me a while to figure it out. I mean, both your reactions to the whole thing and each other were wrong. Completely wrong. It’s not like you to lose it so completely and he’s usually so smooth, so cool. Everything you two did, everything you said, was just a bit off. And Ianto sometimes looks at me, like he’s not sure whether to hate me or love me and to my knowledge, I’ve done nothing to warrant hate. But then Gwen started her little game of ‘last snog’ and the way you two looked at each other, _whoa_. It fell into place pretty easily then. You two have been fucking for months.”

There was still the option of lying. But Buffy was like a blood hound on a trail with things like this and Jack had never seen a reason to lie about anything sexual before. Why should he? Sex was beautiful. People were beautiful. And kissing was the single best thing humans had ever invented. He wasn’t about to start denying that now. Not for a man who had used him. Ianto had slept with Jack to curry favour, to have an easier time hiding Lisa. It had all been a game. 

And damn, that _hurt_. More than it should. A lot more.

“We were. Now we’re not. The cyber girlfriend in the basement kind of cramped our style.”

For a long minute the slayer just stared at him, the same way the Doctor looked at a difficult problem. Jack stood there and took it silently. Then the blonde shrugged and swung her legs off the table, standing to leave.

“Alright then. None of my business, I guess. I just wanted to know.”

He nodded once. “No problem.”

She walked to the door. 

“You can stay, if you want to.” It was an easy invitation, spoken a million times to her alone. _Stay with me, spend the night, don’t go._ He rarely got turned down and even more rarely by her.

But she stopped, one hand on the door jamb and shook her head no. “I’m a lot of things for you, Captain Jack Harkness, but I am not that girl.”

“What girl?”

“The girl you fuck to get back at Ianto. Good night.”

And then she was out the door and down the stairs, through the cog door. Gone. And Jack still stood in the middle of his office and sighed. He knew what that meant. It meant there would be Buffy and there would be Jack in the foreseeable future, but not Buffy and Jack. It meant their relationship days were put on ice for the time being. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and wouldn’t be the last. But it was the first time it had happened without one of them being in a relationship, or one hell of a row. 

They’d never broken up on principle before.

The only way to get Buffy back into his bed was to either mend fences with Ianto or wait until the young man was dead. Which was definitely too long. Damn it. As much as Jack loved Buffy Summers Slayer, she had an annoying tendency to mess with his head, life and morals. 

Cannibals long forgotten, Jack crawled down to his bed thinking of his archivist and his second in command and the fact that relationships that lasted longer than two dozen orgasms were nothing but trouble. 

+

+

**Do**

+

Detective Kathy Swanson was used to seeing strange things. But arriving at Hedley Point after spending the night reading poetry to the Captain was stranger than any of those strange things she’d witnessed.

The first two people she stumbled over were a young man – the Torchwood doctor, if her meagre research was right – rocking a sobbing PC Gwen Cooper whose hair was matted with blood. A few steps farther she found Captain Jack Harkness standing with his gun still in hand, staring down at the two women lying on the ground. 

A brunette in her early thirties was lying on her back, torso riddled with bullets holes, dead. The other one was younger and blonde, lying next to the corpse with her hands folded under her face, like a sleeping child. She was murmuring in the dead woman’s ear, her tones lilting and soft. She didn’t look up when the Detective came to a halt next to the Captain, critically looking the dead woman over. 

The blood, the wounds, the chipped wooden boards to one side of the corpse - the woman had obviously been shot while already down. It looked like a whole clip had been emptied into her and nothing - _nothing_ \- could be bad enough to deserve such treatment. 

Kathy opened her mouth, about to ask Captain Harkness what the hell he thought he was doing, playing Wild West in her city, when the blonde suddenly stopped speaking and sat up. In one smooth movement she rolled on top of the dead woman, straddling her middle. She framed the pale face with small hands and bent low. 

When she spoke her voice had lost all its former softness, turned hard and cold, “May you find oblivion, Suzie Costello. It’s better than you deserve.”

Then she stood and dusted off her coat, nodding to the police officer in greeting. She walked past Kathy and crouched down next to the other two Torchwood members. “Owen, bad and tag, Gwenie, there’s an ambulance, let them check you over.”

“Now hold on just a second!” Detective Swanson called out. “You can’t just bag the body and walk off like nothing happened. You killed that woman!”

The Captain gave her his best flirty smile – completely wasted – and said in a voice that did not match his expression, “She tried to kill one of my team. She is the one responsible for the three dead you found yesterday and for the three murder victims of an unsolved case three months ago. Plus, my case, my body, my evidence.”

Kathy would have protested, would have argued and threatened, but she found she had no leg to stand on. Who would she complain to? What did she have to threaten Torchwood with? Nothing, that’s what. The doctor – Owen – was already hauling away the body and the PC had been carefully placed in the passenger seat of the SUV. The blonde was walking toward the Captain.

“Jack, Gwen’s asking for you. I think she’s scared about you firing her. You should go.”

The man in question nodded, finally holstered his gun and walked off without a backward glance or word. The two women – one pale as the winter sun, the other dark as desert night – were left alone, staring at each other awkwardly.

“What happened here? Who is Suzie Costello?”

“You know I can’t answer that question.”

Kathy laughed and shook her head without humour. “God, you people are unbelievable. You walk all over people like they don’t matter, like they are only pieces in some game.”

“Who says they aren’t?”

The Detective froze mid-motion, eyes going wide and hands cold. “What?” she croaked. Of all the things she had expected to hear, this wasn’t it. This really wasn’t it.

“We do our best, Detective, every single day. Sometimes we save people, sometimes we kill them. But we try, believe me, we try. Suzie Costello wanted to be immortal and killed six people to get there. Now she’s nothing. You live, you fight, you die. That’s what we do. You don’t like the way we walk over this city. I get that. I understand it, really. But there isn’t a damn thing you can to about it.”

“I can order my people to make life hard for you.” 

“Yes. You can. Then we’ll walk over them, too, and still get what we want. You’re smart, Kathy Swanson. Not complacent like your colleagues, not pragmatic. You believe in what you do. But so do we.” 

She might have said more, but the Captain leaned on the horn right then and with an eye roll the blonde woman turned and jogged to the car. She didn’t say goodbye either. Rude people. 

For a minute after the SUV left the scene, Kathy stood staring after it. Everything she’d just been told had reaffirmed what she knew about Torchwood and its people. They were callous, they were out of control, they were wild and disregarded outsiders completely. They were dangerous. 

But what was she supposed to do? She had spent all night on the phone with the Captain and her people still hadn’t managed to trace the call. The files on all personnel of Torchwood were buried too deep for anyone to find, any case they took over disappeared without a trace. They never left evidence, never left bodies, never even left CCTV footage of what they did. Three, four times a week footage from cameras all over the city disappeared, simply gone. They showed up without being called and no matter how high you went with your complaints, no-one was responsible for Torchwood. 

They were ghosts, ghost taking over the city and there was nothing Detective Kathy Swanson could do. 

Nothing at all.

+

+

**Space III**

+

She wasn’t exactly counting, but in hindsight she guessed it was at least fifty years. Fifty years tumbling around the universe in a ship that loved her because she was endless - time stretched into infinity – and a Time Lord who sometimes hated her for the very same thing.

She saved the world – worlds – with him and brought down civilizations, she loved and hated, changed and stayed the same. For more than fifty years, she was the Time Lord’s Companion.

And then Rose came along. Rose, who was more human than she was. Rose who looked at the world with wonder in her eyes. Who asked questions and saw beauty without trying. Rose, who remembered mercy and joy and simple pleasures. Rose, who was a reason to stay alive, a place to go home to. 

With her and the Doctor alone in space, it was like they were driftwood and the universe their playground. Rose thought small. Rose _was_ small. 

It made her spellbinding and Buffy understood - for the first time - why the gods of old always loved mortals. Understood why they fell from grace so easily. 

Mortality was colour in a world of grey. 

They stood on a crowded street in the sunshine after watching Earth burn and the Doctor told Rose were he was from, told her that he was the last. 

She just looked at him and said, “There’s me.”

And Buffy knew that her time with the Doctor was coming to an end. 

The god of time was already falling.

+

+

**Tell**

+

Gwen looked small, curled up in blankets, huddled in her swivel chair. Small and lost. Like someone who’d just had the life sucked out of them and then put back – put back with the taste of a dead woman’s despair still all over it. 

She could feel Suzie, echoing inside her head, laughing, crying, desperate. She’d wanted to live so badly – more than anything else, more than happiness, more than safety, more than the world, she only wanted to _live_. Gwen tried, tried hard, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to hate the other woman for that. For her actions, her betrayal, yes, but not for the wild, crazy _need_ that had driven her.

Owen and Tosh had finally gone home an hour ago and Jack and Ianto were elsewhere in the Hub, leaving the brunette alone. They hadn’t meant to, she’d told them she would go home any minute, that she was fine. 

But somehow she couldn’t move from that chair. 

Buffy materialised in front of her the way she always did – like a shadow coming, a draft creeping in, a ghost whispering – soundlessly, invisibly. She was just there suddenly.

“Ianto suggested putting a lock on Suzie’s…grave.”

Gwen tried to smile but it didn’t quite work out. “You’re like Jack, aren’t you?”

The default smile disappeared from the other woman’s face. “In what way?”

Gwen pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and said, “When I joined Torchwood, he told me he couldn’t die. You’re the same, aren’t you?”

“What makes you think that?” Neither denial nor confirmation, only a question. It was an answer in itself. 

She turned her head away. “You look the same. When you think no-one’s watching. You look the same.”

“You are too damn perceptive, Gwen Cooper,” Buffy decided and pulled Tosh’s chair over to seat herself.

“So Rhys keeps telling me.” This time the smile worked.

“Why are you asking?”

“Suzie. She... she said there’s nothing. Only darkness.”

“You want to know if she was telling the truth?”

A shrug. “She wasn’t very truthful the rest of the time. So yes. I want to know.”

Buffy leaned back in the chair, putting both her feet up on Owen’s workstation. Dirt crumbled from her boots onto the already messy desk and Gwen rolled her eyes. 

Owen and Buffy had a weird contest going on, the only goal of which seemed to be to get the other to lose it first. So far, Owen had put glue on Buffy’s keyboard, Buffy had retaliated by locking him into one of the vaults for hours, Owen had spiked her coffee with the alien equivalent of laxatives and Buffy had installed an ‘I love Janet’ screensaver on his computer that refused to be deleted.

Gwen had no doubt at all that the only reason the blonde was going along with the whole thing was because it tended to brighten up everyone’s dreary day. They lost too many people, saw too much violence. The look on Owen’s face when he realized he had just been tricked into locking himself into a cell made all the ugly things easier to bear. 

“Are you sure you want to know?” The same question Jack had asked her when she had wanted to know about Buffy. The same heavy undertone of truths that might be unbearable. Was it merely old age making the two arrogant, or did they know something the lowly humans didn’t? Some universal truth, some dark secret? What was it that made them different, put the haunted look in their eyes?

“Yes.” She hoped Buffy would tell her, instead of kidding around like Jack had. 

“Suzie was telling the truth. In a way. There’s nothing, but not in a way a living person can understand.”

“Try me?” She sounded needy, even to her own ears.

“Darkness, absolute, perfect darkness. The kind that doesn’t even know light exists. You have no hands, not feet, no body. No head to think with, nothing to cling to. All you are, is a… spark, an idea. I. Self. You don’t see, you don’t smell, you don’t taste, or feel, or hear. You only exist. All you are, is what defines you.”

A break, in voice and words, a crack. “Your memories, your hopes and dreams. That’s all you have. And you can’t move. Can’t think, can’t change. And the darkness pushes against the boundaries of this… Self, pushes into you, through you. If you let go, you become the dark.” 

There were tears in Gwen’s eyes as she stared, unblinkingly, at Buffy. “God,” she whispered, trying to keep the pieces together. “God, I’m so sorry I asked. I…”

Buffy shook her head and lowered her feet to the floor in order to lean forward and lay a hand on the brunette’s shoulder.

“No, Gwenie, you’re missing the point. It’s beautiful. If you stop fighting it, if you just let the darkness in, it’s perfect. Nothing hurts, no pain, no tears, no grief. You miss nothing and you remember nothing.” 

Her voice far away, her eyes birdlike in their remoteness, she spoke as if compelled, words flowing from her to Gwen – Gwen who wanted to press her hands to her ears and stop _hearing_ but couldn’t because she had wanted truth and this was truth, this was the abyss inside the other woman’s soul, the truth of her and all her lives, of everything she was. 

Oblivion.

“No more broken bones, no heartache, no tears. You don’t bleed, you don’t… all the bad things go away. If you let them.”

But with the bad things – that is what went unsaid, unseen perhaps – the good went, too. What defined self, disappeared and who you were went away. If you gave up all the bad things, and the good, there would be nothing left of you.

Buffy’s hand moved to wipe away Gwen’s tears and she cooed softly, “Don’t cry for Suzie. She got better than she deserves.”

Gwen shook her head, desperately, wordlessly, trying to convey that no, no, not for Suzie, these tears were not for her. They were for a woman who had lost all the good things, who was willing to give up herself for a little bit of peace, any peace at all – peace even, that took away her self, the very core of… of _everything_. 

Tears for a woman who smiled and tucked the blanket tighter, pulled her to her feet and bundled her into the car, who drove her home and hugged her tight and all the while remembered what nothing felt like and wasn’t scared.

+

+

**Snog**

+

Jack could hear Buffy and Gwen talking below when the door to his office opened and then shut again. He didn’t have to look up to know it was Ianto standing there, stopwatch in hand. 

But look up he did and he couldn’t help the grin that crept onto his face. He had missed his lover, more than probably appropriate, considering who and what they were outside of bed. 

He stood with a flourish and swept around the desk, grabbing the younger man by the wrist and pulling him in for a kiss that made your toes curl just from watching. They only stopped when air became and issue, pulling apart slightly.

Jack tried to pull Ianto further into the room, but the man wouldn’t budge. Instead he ran a hand over his face and took a deep breath. “Jack.”

When the Captain didn’t react, just kept yanking on the arm, he repeated his name, “Jack, stop it. We need to talk.”

The ex con-man cringed dramatically. “Can we at least have sex first?”

The look he got clearly said no. He let go of the hand he had been pulling on and sank down on the edge of his cluttered desk. “Look, Ianto, if you’re not sure about this, we don’t. A lot has happened and -“

He was cut off by a headshake. “It’s not that. I just… Buffy. I need to know that she’s okay with this. I know you and her mean something to each other and I will not get between you.”

“You can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Get between us. We broke it off when she found out about you and me.”

The younger of the two men blanched. “What? But she hasn’t said…”

Jack shook his head, aware of the young man’s feelings for the blonde. After only a few months, they were fast friends. The kind that went to the movies together, smiled at each other for no reason and talked about trivial stuff like it mattered. It was the same kind of companionship that Buffy had always offered Jack. The kind whose worth he had almost recognized too late.

“Not like that, Ianto. It’s all good. I swear.”

“Are you sure?” Hesitant, angry, scared, needy, wild and still so full of bottomless rage and grief. A glorious thing, Ianto Jones after the end of his world, still struggling free of the ruins and already shining so bright Jack just couldn’t stay away.

“Would I lie about this?”

“If it meant you got sex out of it? Yes.” Jaded, too. And on to him already. Damn.

“I never lie about good sex, good food, or Buffy.”

A smile. Ianto relaxed just the fraction of an inch the Captain needed to work his magic.

“So,” he asked with his best casual want-to-eat-me? smile. “Where’s that stopwatch?”

+

+

**Scream**

+

The first thing Toshiko heard as she stepped out of the movie theatre followed by a bickering Owen and Buffy was a scream. The second was Buffy’s groan of, “Oh come _on_ , it’s not even Tuesday.”

Then there was a lot of running and dodging around civilians, some more screaming and a bit of stumbling as she tried to link up to the Torchwood mainframe while running with a gun in one hand.

And then there was being tackled by a rampaging Weevil, losing the gun – and the computer – and lying on the floor, tasting her own blood and getting ready to waste her last breath on this earth screaming as loudly as she could.

And _then_ Buffy as suddenly calling somewhere to her left, “Hey, ugly, lookie what I have here!”

Tosh couldn’t help herself, looking away from the Weevil above her just long enough to find Buffy holding Owen by the neck. “A tasty little Owen snack! He’s a bit on the skinny side, but he’s got a big head, so that should make up for it.”

Owen was cursing violently but didn’t have much success in escaping the small woman’s iron grip. “Come on, ugly, you’ve got to be hungry. Owen tastes much better than Tosh. And he’s bigger, too!”

Whether or not the Weevil understood the Owen-promotion Buffy was doing would forever remain a mystery, but it suddenly moved off the prone woman and started toward the other two team members at a loping run.

Buffy waited until the last possible moment before shoving Owen to the left and flinging herself to the right. She came up in a roll while the doctor was still screaming bloody murder and skidded toward Toshiko on the wet concrete. 

“You alright?” she asked.

Tosh nodded. “Owen…,” she prompted as she sat up and groped around for her gun. The other woman handed it to her calmly and she frowned. Owen and Buffy didn’t get along very well, that was no secret. Their prank war and bitching kept everyone at the Hub entertained for hours on end. Offering Owen up as bait fit right into Buffy’s MO when it came to the grumpy doctor. Leaving him to actually become a meal though, didn’t.

So Tosh asked again, “Owen?”

The man in question upped the volume of his curses a few yards away. Then he switched to screaming.

Buffy jumped. “Oh, right.”

And then she was off like a shot to save the bait.

+

+

**Time II**

+

Jack came to with a killer headache next to a small dirt road just outside Bath 1871. As far as waking up went, this one wasn’t very high on his list but far from the bottom, too. Waking up chained came to mind. Or drugged. Or about to be killed by meteorite strike. Or with an irate Buffy about to pour a bucket of ice water all over him. 

Still, his head felt like someone had made short work of it with an axe and he had sort of forgotten how he had gotten into the situation in the first place. A hand suddenly appeared in his narrow field of vision and he grasped it automatically, letting his companion pull him to his feet. He stumbled again and almost took Buffy with him by sheer, fumbling size. She managed to divert his tumble into a tree, turning him so he landed back first against it and managed to keep his feet.

Running a hand over his face, he groaned, “What happened?”

He cracked one eye open to see the blonde take a step back, fussing over her dress. It was possibly another kink of his, but she looked hot in layers upon layers of petticoats, corsets and lace trimmings. Very hot. The glare she sent him was hot, too, but in an entirely different way.

“You got into a brawl. Again.”

“Out here?”

“No,” she drawled, playing the irate, put-upon wife to perfection except… something was off. Behind the anger and the usual annoyance was a softness, a gentleness she rarely showed. “I brought you here.”

“Why? Last thing I remember was that guy conking me on the head. You could have just parked me at home until I woke up.”

That was when he noticed the carriage, loaded high with suitcases. Buffy gave up fussing with her sleeves and followed his gaze to what amounted to their entire possessions packed and piled.

“You weren’t knocked out, Jack. That guy didn’t conk you on the head. He broke your neck.”

The Captain laughed uncomfortably in the face of her seriousness. “That’s impossible. I’m not like you, I don’t come back from the dead on a regular basis.”

She looked at him, all the pretence of anger gone, leaving only bone deep sorrow, a sorrow she had carried with her since… since the Gaming Station, if Jack was honest. She didn’t say a word.

“No.” He shook his head, trying to take a step back, ending up pressing against the rough bark of the tree like a child crawling into a corner. “No. I was passed out, that’s all.”

“Jack, that’s not-“

He didn’t let her finish, couldn’t let her finish. “No!”

He saw what dying did to Buffy, saw the blank panic, the fear, the pain in her eyes when she came back, saw her insomniac walking of their rooms late at night, saw her gazing at the stars and wishing for release. Saw everything she tried to cover with smiles and jokes and coy flirting. He _saw_ it. He wasn’t like that. He was Captain Jack Harkness, omnisexual Time Agent from the fifty first century. He was not like her. He couldn’t…

She stepped up to him while his mind was still reeling, gently placing her small hands on either side of his face. She had to stand on tiptoe to do it, something that always, always, endeared her to him. 

When she spoke it was in a whisper of age and memory, in the voice that was not one but many. The voice that didn’t belong to Buffy but to the other that lived inside of her. The voice of Death. “Remember, Jack. Where you went. The darkness. The silence.”

And with the words came images, blurred, frightening images, pulled from the depths of his mind by her hands, her voice. She was inside his head, making him see, making him _remember_.

The darkness. The silence. The fear. “No. Nonononononononono.” It became a mantra, a never ending stream of denial that ran as freely as his tears. Ran and ran and ran. He couldn’t be this. He couldn’t. Not like her. Not alien and strange and sad. Not. Like. Her.

Eventually, he passed out.

+

When Jack woke this time he didn’t even notice the headache, only the hollow feeling in his chest and the taste of ashes in his mouth. His head was in Buffy’s lap and it was starting to rain.

“How long have you known?” A whisper, a plea, _please don’t answer._

“Since it happened. Rose brought you back. I knew as soon as the Doctor told me. It’s why I came back for you. Why I stayed. I couldn’t leave you like that.”

He laughed and it was a bitter thing, a dead man’s roar. “Thank you. Thanks. A lot.”

Ignoring the agony inside his body, he sat up. He couldn’t touch her. Couldn’t be close to her. He had to get away. He had to forget the darkness and the silence, had to forget what happened, how it felt to die - and God, he remembered now, the feeling of his neck breaking, his heart stopping, dying, he remembered dying – had to forget everything.

Had to – 

“Jack. I am so sorry.”

“Why? You have a companion now, don’t you? Someone just like you.”

She flinched at his words and he knew he had hit the nail on the head. She was glad to have him. Glad that he was some… freak, now, too. In that moment, that glorious, singular moment in time, he hated her with every cell in his body. 

But Buffy wouldn’t have been Buffy if she hadn’t come back for seconds, hadn’t been noble and self-sacrificing. “I didn’t do this to you. And I hate myself for being glad it happened, some days. I would change it, Jack, if I could.”

“Well, that makes two of us then,” he snarled, not sure if he was talking about changing things or hating her. Her smile was a watery grimace.

“I know.”

And then the question, the inevitable, all important question asked itself, “Why me?”

She shook her head and wiped a strand of hair out of her face. The skies opened and the rain poured on them both. “I don’t know. I knew that you existed, somewhere, somewhen, for a long time. But I swear to all gods, Jack, I had no idea that it would be you.”

“The hell are you talking about?” he demanded, clinging to her words, to the small things, in order to keep his sanity in tact. If he thought now, if he let go of this moment, he would never find himself again. 

“The third side of the triangle.”

“What?”

“This was preordained, in a way. The Doctor, me, a third. That third is you.”

“The third of what? You’re not making any _fucking_ sense.”

She stood only to avoid answering immediately and patted her skirts into place, despite it being a lost cause. Dirt and mud clung to her backside and the rain had drenched them both to the bone by now. Not that Jack noticed any of that. 

“I don’t know why we exist. I don’t know our purpose. I could feel the echo of you, across time and space, a long time before I met you. But it’s never seen more than that. From this moment on, I’m as clueless as you, Jack. We’re in this together.”

“Hu-ray,” he snarled as he stood, too, wiping water from his face without care. “So that’s it? You’re immortal, Jack, deal with it?”

She looked like a drowned rat, standing there, her hair flapping into her face wetly, her prim dress falling in on itself, eyes wide and birdlike, distant - the way they got when she _saw_ things, when she knew what was unknown – her face a mask of compassion, of care. Of pity. For him. Oh yes, he hated her.

In the end the only consolation she could offer him, the only words she had left after damning him - _condemning him to eternity_ \- were cold and useless things, that rang in his ears like a bad joke and bitter laughter.

“We are what we are.”

When she reached for him, he jerked away. 

+

+

**Be**

+

“Tell me again why we have to fetch our lunch instead of having it delivered?” Buffy asked from where she was slumped against the wall, trying her best to keep her eyes open. 

Ianto winced at the sight of Buffy tired because he had a fairly good idea what it took to get the woman there. She must have been awake for a long time to look this exhausted. In public no less. Even the short walk to the Indian restaurant they were standing in had done nothing to revive her. He silently promised to make her some of Jack’s industrial strength coffee as soon as they got back to the Hub.

“Because the delivery boy refuses to come close to the tourist office since he almost got eaten by a sentient plant,” he replied belatedly, careful to make sure they weren’t overheard. Not that that was a problem. It was too early for normal people to have lunch and the restaurant had just opened. Since Torchwood had been working since four am, though, everyone was hungry and ready to start eating alien tech if Ianto didn’t feed them. Buffy flinched slightly in sympathy at almost being eaten by a giant begonia. Then she returned to that state that Gwen called standby mode. It happened to the small woman when there was nothing to do. She just sort of… switched off. Her eyes were still open, she still noticed everything around her, but it was like she wasn’t there, inside her skin anymore.

It freaked the others out but not Ianto. Jack, he had learned, did something similar late at night when everyone else slept. Both Jack and Buffy seemed to have forgotten what the concept of sleep actually meant. They slept an hour, maybe two every night and sometimes went days without. They got tired, alright, but they didn’t sleep. Hence, their caffeine addictions and Buffy’s I’ll-fall-asleep-standing routine. Owen kept suggesting they get themselves treated for insomnia, but both just smiled and ignored him. 

They, at least, knew why they couldn’t sleep, but they weren’t sharing. Gwen seemed to have some inkling to what made her superiors so special, but she wasn’t sharing any more than the two in question. Instead they went into standby mode and drew enough energy from that to keep going. Ianto left her like that while he placed their lengthy order and refused the offer of a coffee while he waited. He preferred his own, thanks a lot. 

Once the waitress had disappeared to place their order, he joined his team member in supporting the wall. She shook herself visibly and then asked, “Did you order extra rice for Jack?”

“Yes.”

“How are the two of you doing?”

Ianto looked at her askew. How were they doing? “We shag,” he said, trying to keep the incredulous note out of his voice. 

“That’s not all you do.” Buffy seemed convinced.

“Sometimes we just snog.” The boss’s part time shag, that was what Owen called it. That was all it was. 

Buffy grunted loudly in disagreement. “Jack likes you, Yan. You know that, don’t you?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, ma’am.”

She frowned furiously at the title but managed not to scold him for it yet again. “He does. He just wouldn’t know a conventional relationship if it stood in front of him, waving a sign.” 

“You would know.” I was out before he could stop it and with it came the bitterness. He cared for Jack. He had even before, when all Jack was meant to be was a means to an end, another layer of protection for Lisa. He couldn’t help it. The way the man always found something to smile about, the way he never stopped, never gave up, on anyone, anything. The way he shared his affection so freely, cared so deeply for his team. Owen saw a father in him despite the relatively small age difference, Toshiko her saviour, Gwen a hero. And Ianto… Ianto saw too many things in his leader to put them into words. After Lisa, after Canary Wharf, after the past year, Jack was all there was. Jack and Torchwood. And Jack was Torchwood, so really, it all came full circle. 

“Yes,” Buffy said, calmly, refusing to rise to the bait. “I would.”

When she refused to say more, something else slipped from the usually to controlled archivist’s lips. “He belongs to you.”

She laughed, a sharp bark without joy and moved to stand in front of him, between his slightly spread feet, looking up at him, dead serious. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Jack. I really do. But there are times when I hate him almost as much. We are the only ones of our kind. Just him and me and that ties us together in a way that’s impossible to understand. But he doesn’t belong to me any more than I belong to him. We stick together because we have to, we love each other because we want to and we let each other go because otherwise, we’d hate the other.”

Free the way conjoined twins were, in mind and spirit, but bound in reality, grown into one being, one cosmos. Ianto understood that better than Buffy gave him credit for. Buffy and Jack were joined by what they were, by their very natures and even if they distanced themselves, they were still _not apart_. They never would be. He was okay with that, most days. He got to sleep with Jack and joke with Buffy. Best of both worlds, or so he thought.

But he was human and the fallacy of all humans was to want. Ianto wanted. He wanted more than he could ever have, more than he ever dared ask for. 

So he took what he got, forced himself to be okay with the status quo and let the rest go. He went on lunch runs with Buffy and snogged Jack in dark corners of the Hub, he made coffee for both of them and watched over them when they sank into themselves. He didn’t freak out, he didn’t run away, he didn’t judge. 

He was simply there and he hoped – prayed some nights – that they would return that favour. 

The waitress arrived, carrying three big plastic bags filled to burst with curry and chicken tikka, salad for Gwen and extra rice. Ianto paid while Buffy took two of the bags, leaving the last for him and they returned to the Hub in silence, occasionally broken by a jaw-splitting yawn and nothing else.

+

+

**Move**

+

_Jack_. 

It wasn’t a verbal call, wasn’t a word that resounded in his head, but the echo of a thought and the Captain knew the taste of that echo as well as he knew himself.

It was Buffy. 

His fellow immortal was asking for him, worn down by stress, weariness and plain, overwhelming exhaustion. Not the kind that came from battles and fights to the death, from travelling through time and space and hunting the bad guys. The other kind, the kind that happened when you got up in the morning and compiled a list of what you had to do and suddenly felt run over by your life. 

And Jack knew why Buffy was feeling that way. Her furniture and other things she had bought for her flat had started arriving the day before and she had taken time off to get them sorted. Building up a home from pretty much scratch was a daunting thought at the best of times, but coupled with the slayer’s deep rooted fear of _settling_ , oh yes, Jack knew why Buffy was tired enough to call inside his head instead of using the phone. 

_Jack_. 

He quirked a small smile, inordinately happy that he was the one she came to for help, and picked up the phone to order pizza. Once that was done he typed out a text message to the rest of the team. _Volunteers only_ it read, _Buffy’s apartment._

Then he went upstairs to get the keys for the SUV and drove to pick up the pizza. Twenty minutes later he parked the car in the parking lot of Buffy’s apartment building. It was mostly filled this time of night, but the blonde had no car of her own, preferring to get around on foot. If you could outrun a car, it seemed only logical. He parked in her space.

He was working his way through all the names in the register, trying to figure out which bell to ring when he heard another car pulling up behind him. Ianto exited, followed closely by Tosh, who looked very different in comfortable pants and sneakers, her hair in a messy ponytail. Ianto, too, had gotten out of the suit and into a pair of jeans. 

They both greeted him with smiles and a small wave on Tosh’s part. Ianto took the pizza cartons. Gwen was dropped off by Rhys, yawning widely. She was wearing a nice dress that implied she had been one a date with her boyfriend earlier in the evening. Jack felt a bit guilty for interrupting the evening but it was Gwen’s choice to come help.

Owen was last, joining them just as the door was about to fall closed behind them after Buffy had buzzed it open, griping about having been on the pull, and couldn’t brave Buffy face a few boxes on her own. But he’d come and that made Jack ruffle his hair and tell him to shut up.

They made their way to the fifth floor, Gwen humming along with the elevator music and found flat 504. Buffy opened the door with a look of relief on her face that turned into disbelief when she noticed that all of Torchwood had turned out to help her get settled.

Her tired expression morphed into a grin as she opened the door wide to let them all in and directed Ianto toward the kitchen with the pizzas.

Owen meanwhile looked around the room and whistled, “You know, for someone so small, you have a lot of stuff.”

New furniture was parked willy-nilly throughout the room and boxes, some out of storage, some new, some from gods knew where, were piled everywhere. There was a small path that led around the room, but everywhere else was taken up in one way or another.

As Gwen followed Ianto to see if she could find them drinks, Toshiko, bless her analytical little heart, looked around and asked, “Are these sorted by room yet?”

Buffy shook her head. “The deliveries kept pouring in all day, I barely had time to figure out where to put it all.” She grimaced, “I really spent too long living in hotels and on the road.”

“Well then,” Tosh took over, “We’ll sort the boxes first, then unpack. Owen, you take that stack over there, Jack, to the left. I’ll take that one and – “

+

Five hours later Jack figured that if aliens decided to invade now, they had a good chance of succeeding. All of Torchwood Three was passed out in various places around the apartment. Ianto and Tosh had taken the bed, Gwen the sofa and Owen the love seat. Only Jack himself and Buffy were still on their feet as they had just put the finishing touches to the kitchen. 

The flat wasn’t finished by any means, there were still boxes filled with books and clothes strewn around, but the important things, as well as all furniture, were where they belonged.

The Captain checked his wrist strap and almost groaned. It was five in the morning. In three hours, the people strewn around him were supposed to be at work. Oh well, he could just give them all the morning off.

He met Buffy’s eyes across the room and they both smiled a bit like proud parents did and the slayer mouthed a soundless, “Thank you.”

He nodded.

They were just about to find a horizontal surface to settle down as well when the doorbell rang. Buffy raised an eyebrow but went to press the button next to the door and ask, “Who’s this?”

“Erm, this is Rhys. Gwen’s boyfriend? She didn’t come home last night and I’m on my way to work, so I thought….” He hesitated, probably realizing that he was babbling and then saved himself by announcing, “I brought coffee.”

Jack laughed.

+

+

**Celebrate**

+

Owen wasn’t sure how long he had been standing on the airfield, watching the blue sky, the wind ripping at his clothes, trying to take the white scarf in his hands from him. His knuckles were white, too, from holding on so tight and his jaw hurt because he had to clench it. If he didn’t… he ground his teeth harder. 

And then Buffy showed up. She stood beside him silently, her eyes skimming the sky where Diane had disappeared the same way she had come – fast and turbulently, through a gap that Owen felt must be situated in his own heart. 

“It’s Christmas,” she finally said. He grunted. “You shouldn’t be out here, alone.”

He would have answered, honest, but his jaw was still clenched so tightly, his teeth were still grinding, a fortress against the numb thing inside of him. If he relaxed, if he let it rise, it would come like bile, bitter and painful. So he said nothing and Buffy was there suddenly, wrapping her arms around him, holding him close. 

He realized how cold he was only when her body was there to shield him from the wind. If it had been one of the other girls he would have snarled and mocked them. Jack or Ianto he would have simply socked in the chin. He could do neither to the blonde. Couldn’t hurt her with words or fists, couldn’t make her go away.

She was the one who stayed late to help Ianto clean up the latest mess. She was the one who offered to be Gwen’s excuse for coming home late again. She dragged Tosh out when the woman got distant and geeky again. She stayed with Owen when he had to cut up the latest body - sensing his quiet discomfort at being alone with a body and not saying a word about it.

She was the chest of secrets, the keeper of keys not to Torchwood Three, but to its souls. Not because she was a great talker, a great hugger or good at reassuring people. She didn’t coddle anyone. But she listened to anything, anything at all you had to say. She didn’t judge. 

She didn’t flinch. 

She didn’t look annoyed when a grown man broke down because the pain tore away his barrier of teeth and silence and made him cry like a silly little boy in an empty airfield, under the endless sky. She just let him weep. 

And when he was done she took the white scarf from him and folded it into a neat, small square before tugging it into his jacket pocket – where he could keep it close without Gwen looking at him full of pity and Ianto mocking him wordlessly. 

Finally, just to fill the silence and steal the time to pull the tatters of himself together, he asked, “Shouldn’t you be telling me that I’m better off without her and we never would have worked?”

“If you want me to, sure. Or I could tell you that if you weren’t more important than her adventures, maybe you really are better off without her and that you’ll survive.”

“Promise?” God, he was pathetic, sounding like a teenage girl in love. Keeper of keys, he told himself.

“Girl Scout’s Honour.” 

“You were a Girl Scout?”

“I ate the cookies,” she confessed, then repeated, “It’s Christmas.”

“So?”

She looked at him bug-eyed, “How long have you worked for Jack?”

“Four years.”

“And he’s never made you celebrate with him?”

“No?”

“No naked carolling, no eggnog punch with nothing in it but eggnog and rum? No rain of mistletoe? No Glenn Miller karaoke?”

Owen knew without needing a mirror that his expression was something between horrified and spellbound. Naked carolling? He shook his head numbly, not sure whether the tricky woman was pulling his leg to get him out of his funk, or if she was telling the truth. In the end he deemed it prudent to ask, “Are you serious?”

She nodded, then shrugged. “Well, the naked carolling was a one time thing and a direct consequence of the eggnog punch. But the rest? Jack really loves Christmas.”

Before he had a chance to work through all that she grabbed him by the arm and started pulling him toward his sleek, tiny car. Owen let her, his spirits momentarily lifted by her crazy stories, but as they left the airfield his gaze remained fixed on the rear view mirrors, hoping – waiting – for a plane to appear on the horizon.

It didn’t.

+

+

**Space IV**

+

The ground was still hot under their feet as they stepped out of the TARDIS and onto plains of what had, only months before, been a frugal planet, full of life. Now it was a reddish black ruin, a burnt cinder. A whole planet, a whole people, wiped out by a single raging firestorm in the time it took to draw a long breath.

The dead hit Buffy as soon as both her feet were on solid ground, ripping through her, into her, filling her to bursting. She gasped and bit back on a wave of sickness that threatened to overwhelm her. So many dead. So much lost. So much power. The feeling was heady and heavy, addictive in its potency. Three billion dead and she could feel every one of them.

The Doctor stood a few steps away, surveying the scenery, kicking at the hot dust. He put a hand over his eyes, scouting around. It was no use. The planet was empty, mountain ranges levelled, cities fallen back into the ground like they had never existed. 

He turned back to her with a sigh and took her in, from toe to head, her bowed spine, her slow, heavy breathing, the way she tried to hold onto herself, clinging to who she was for dear life in the maelstrom of lost souls. 

The expression on the Time Lord’s face turned to ill-disguised disgust. “You are feeding on them. On their deaths.”

She pushed back the power, reigned it in with bonds of steel and turned to look at him levelly, “I can’t help it, Doc. I am what I am.”

Maybe it was her blasé attitude, the way she batted away his complaint, but the expression on his face became stronger. “You feed on _death_.”

And he looked with her with such contempt, such arrogance, that she felt an ugly smile bloom on her face in response, felt her mouth open and herself speak, “But I didn’t kill them. _I_ don’t do genocide, Doctor.”

She turned and marched back into the TARDIS, not waiting to see how deeply her words cut, how cruelly they twisted his heart. His disgust, her surgical words, cutting where he hurt the most, they were weapons, guns in a war of two people too different to ever see eye to eye and too similar to ever be free of each other. 

Some days he hated her.

And some days she hated him.

+

+

**Settle**

+

When Jack returned from some last minute Christmas shopping he was pleased to find Buffy had returned with the doctor in tow. He could see at first glance that Owen had locked the pain up tight, the way he had after his fiancée’s death. _I’m not hurting, I’m alright, don’t look at me._ The Captain had been around long enough to know that it was going to backfire spectacularly, but there was nothing he could do.

And if the bottling up allowed Owen to have at least a semi-happy Christmas Eve, Jack wasn’t going to complain. Except… the man looked around shifty eyed, seemingly looking for something. Buffy’s grin was growing wider by the minute.

Great. She had probably told Owen all about Christmas with Captain Jack. He couldn’t help it that he loved Christmas. Back home, there had been no such thing. They had learned about it in school and even then, he had been helplessly fascinated by the fact that a large part of a generally violent and homicidal race was perfectly peaceful and harmonious one day of the year. It seemed like magic to him. So when he had first gotten stranded in the nineteenth century, he had made the best of it and maybe gone a bit overboard the first decade or so. Since Buffy had grown up with American consumer Christmas, she had been endlessly amused by his fascination and bored by the whole thing. They could both live to be a thousand and she would still pick on him for the naked carolling. And now she’d gotten to his team. 

He set his jaw as he swept inside the main chamber of the Hub and started unpacking the goods. Drinks, food, decoration. It was a last minute Christmas out of a bag, but it was better than no Christmas at all. Tosh had decided only hours earlier to forego driving down to see her family so late, and Owen was in no shape to go to the Single Christmas parties he usually haunted. Ianto had expressed a dislike for the idea of going to meet his family, citing as a reason that they worried too much about him wasting his life in a tourist office and he did not like lying to them. Something would have to be done about that, but not tonight.

So instead of just Buffy and himself, as he had expected, there were four of his seven favourite people gathered in the Hub. The others being Gwen – who was happy with Rhys – and the Doctor and Rose – which was a can of worms he was not going to open today. 

As he finished unpacking his bounty, Owen went for the pack of crisps and settled next to Toshiko, for once not making snide comments about anything. Buffy distributed glasses of eggnog around the table and then returned to her place curled up against the archivist, her legs in his lap. 

Jack considered hanging the mistletoe but decided it could wait and instead grabbed Buffy around the waist and bodily lifted her up before settling in her place and putting her back down on his lap as he snuggled into Ianto’s side like a giant cat. For once, the man didn’t protest the show of affection in front of the team. 

It was progress. 

Jack thought of John and people out of their time, he thought of sitting in that car and slowly dying, holding the hand of a desperately lonely man who was a bit of a coward but also – in some ways – braver than Jack ever had been, because even after all that happened, all the pain and hurt and grief, Jack still clung to life with every fibre of his being. He was still afraid of the dark.

Buffy, knowing exactly what her fellow immortal was doing just sighed and snuggled into his chest, perfectly content to be spread across two pretty males. Then Tosh started regaling them with stories of her extended – and mostly drunk – family and Owen’s eyes lost some of their remoteness and Buffy and Ianto were warm against him and Jack would have been perfectly happy to never move again.

+

+

**Know**

+

Jack and Ianto were standing in front of one of the holding cells, both with worried looks on their faces. The Weevil inside the cell was crouched low and emitted a sort of keening noise that – frankly – made Ianto’s hair stand on end.

“What do you think its doing?” the archivist asked without taking his gaze off the alien.

Jack listened for a moment and then decided, “I think it’s weeping.”

“Why?”

“Because one of brethren is in pain,” Buffy supplied from the stairs. Both men turned sideways to look at her in surprise as she came closer. 

“Remember Owen’s studies? They have some low key telepathy going on and this one-“ she cocked her head to one side, eyelids fluttering – as if listening to something no-one else could hear, “Is weeping for another’s pain.”

Ianto remained very still, but something about him changed, some awareness rose in him. “You can hear it.”

“Their telepathy? Yes.”

He had wondered how sometimes Buffy and Jack spoke without words, how she knew where to find them, knew who was hurt and who wasn’t. Had wondered how she had known how to draw him out that first night, when she had taken him to drown his sorrow. “You’re psychic.”

She nodded curtly. The Captain remained silent, though he had to know. 

“But you’re human.”

She smiled at him in passing as she stepped up to the glass and crouched down so she was at the Weevil’s eyelevel. “Human is such a blurry term. You should know me better than that by now.”

Did he? He knew she rarely slept, knew she ran too fast, knew she fought like a woman possessed, knew she had more stories than could possibly be fit into a life of twenty five years. Knew that she felt a Weevil’s cry. Knew that sometimes she looked through people and saw something else, knew she liked the night better than the day and flinched badly at some random, everyday things. 

“This psychic stuff,” she suddenly volunteered, “Was hard work. Took me ages to learn how to control it, how to use it as more than a bit of annoying empathy.”

Another thing that did not fit with who she said she was. Ianto had studied her files the same way he had studied the Captain’s and he had quickly realized that almost all dates concerning the two of them had been erased. But the names and events described were enough to figure out that they had been with Torchwood for a long, long time. Longer perhaps, than anyone else ever had, cryogenically frozen guests included.

So yes, Ianto knew that the two of them were somehow different. But he had never made the logical leap to assuming they were not human. They _looked_ human and mostly acted it, too. They cared. They laughed. They had sex. But now that the leap had been made for him, he couldn’t help but voice the question.

“Then what are you?”

She laid a hand against the glass in a slow, controlled movement and bent her head to lean with her forehead against the transparent wall. Then she started whispering, too low for anyone to understand. 

After a few moments of her whispering the Weevil’s keening suddenly stopped and its cold eyes focused on the woman beyond the glass. Buffy met those eyes and never flinched, never even moved, as a clawed hand rose to paw at the spot where her own still rested. 

Then the Weevil jerked visibly and tore itself away, crawling into the far corner of its cell and curling up. But it remained silent.

Buffy’s hand slid from the glass as she watched the alien and she said, “Good question.”

+

+

**Kill**

+

Looking at Bilis the caretaker Buffy suddenly understood why the man had freaked Gwen out. 

He wasn’t there. He had no smell, no taste, no psychic make up. There was no fear from him, no apprehension, no confusion, no amusement, nothing. He was like a picture on a TV screen, visible, audible, but utterly and completely _fake_.

Humans, demons, even aliens were picked up by Buffy’s enhanced senses, all six of them. Hell, vampires registered and they were dead. But not Bilis, no, not him. He stood there, smiled his creepy, old man smile at her and wasn’t there at all.

Gwen must have picked up on the wrongness of him, must have for once obeyed her gut instincts instead of what she believed was ‘right’ and ‘human’. The other woman wasn’t one for giving in to base instincts, didn’t rely on hunches and gut feelings. Those things were too primal, too inhuman for her tastes. But apparently they still worked because whatever the guy masquerading as a human man was, he was a predator and Gwen, for all her gun toting heroics, was prey.

She was outside now, searching around the house, as far from Bilis as she could get without abandoning her post. Buffy stood in the middle of what must at one point have been the ball room and stared at the thing standing in the doorway, grinning teeth at her, a glint of wicked murder in its eyes. 

She returned the smile cheerfully and let some of her own madness peek through. It took half a step back in surprise. Good. Her smile grew a fraction more sincere. It thought it was scary? It thought it played in the big boys’ league?

It was no _god._

“So,” she asked conversationally, forcing herself to move from her ready position in the middle of the dance floor to trail a hand along the banister framing the view of the lower floor. “What the hell are you?”

Its smile grew wider as it slipped fully into the room, spreading hands in a theatrical motion. The slayer idly wondered if the body had once belonged to a real person, or if it was a mere construct. “I am the caretaker.”

Her look clearly said that she thought differently and it gave her a stern if lecherous grandfatherly glare. “Now, dear –“

“Can it,” she told it sweetly, taking three quick steps toward it and relishing the spark in its eyes that told her it was fighting the urge to back up at the sudden motion. Even better. It had been too long since she’d hunted anything with a bite to it. Weevils really did nothing to satisfy the hunter in her, especially since they weren’t supposed to kill, only restrain these days. Maybe she should take a weekend off, find a nice demon nest and have herself a hunt.

The thought of leaving Cardiff for a bit was followed on its heels by another and she knew the expression on her face turned maniacal as she closed the distance between them. Her head tilted automatically as she studied it. 

“I can’t sense you,” she observed. “Can’t smell you, can’t feel you. You leak no emotion and your mind is dead silent.” One of her hands rose to mimic cupping his jaw without ever touching him, “I can’t even feel your life force. If you have any, that is.”

Its expression of polite consternation never wavered.

“You’re not here at all. You’re some sort of image, an avatar. Your physical form is not based in this dimension, is it?”

It bowed, never taking its eyes off her and conceded, “Very observant of you, mortal.”

How sweet, calling her mortal. It had no idea who it was facing, no idea _what_ it was facing. Her arm shot forward with the speed of someone born to kill and the accuracy of centuries, hand wrapping around its throat, slamming it bodily into the floor. If it felt pain, it didn’t show it.

“If I kill this version of you, is the rest of you going to die, too? Or is that just wishful thinking?”

Its expression remained unchanged, pleasant, smiling, neutral with a hint of something else in its eyes. And then it was gone. 

Gone, like a TV switched off, gone like… something that could disappear in less time than it took to blink. Just gone. Sight, sound and touch, the only three senses it had been noticed by, just _gone_. 

Well, at least it confirmed her avatar theory. The only problem was that avatars tended to be the first warning of bad things. Really bad things. Since Jack and Toshiko were currently somewhere in the past, Owen was totally off his game and Gwen was quietly freaked out, they did not need bad things. 

She allowed herself to drop onto her butt and heaved a sigh of frustration. Action. She’d wished for action. She was all for action. But the kind of action where she got to pummel something. Not the kind where potential pummelees simply vanished from under her. What was that proverb Jack was so fond of quoting?

_May you live in interesting times._

Several of them, actually, she thought. Speaking of Jack – 

Buffy closed her eyes, legs crossed under her, hands on her thighs. _Jack_ , she called and hoped he was still within the building to give her at least some link to him. Reaching people across time was _not_ something that usually happened. The only reason he’d gotten through to her all those months ago was because he had been so wildly desperate, so full of fearhateragegriefhopepanicpain.

_Jack_.

_Jackjackjack_ , she called and breathed a sigh of relief when a flicker of response, of _reaction_ got through. 

_Bilis_ , she screamed across seventy years, _Danger_. The flicker grew and disappeared. 

She’d done all she could for Tosh and Jack. 

Now to find out what the hell the thing called Bilis was. And what it wanted. And how to kill it. Oh yes, definitely that.

+

+

**Wait**

+

They were running, running, running – running like the world was ending and it was and it was their fault and _God_ \- with Jack still half dead between Ianto and Gwen, just running to get away from the Hub – epicentre of the end of the world. Buffy appeared beside Gwen out of nowhere and took Jack’s heavy arm from the other woman.

The Captain worked up the energy to glare at her, “Where the hell have you been?”

No-one had seen her since Owen had opened the Rift to bring Jack and Tosh back from the past, unless it was to confirm she was still alive and to get a change of clothes.

She shrugged, “Trying to find out what the hell Bilis is. What happened to you?”

“Mutiny.”

She grunted but didn’t slow her pace at all at the news. Around them, the team faltered for a few steps then picked up speed again, everyone listening intently to the conversation going on in their midst. 

“Well,” the blonde finally argued, “At least I can guarantee that your people were being fucked with, unlike mine.”

“But yours didn’t kill you,” Jack retorted without missing a beat. Ianto looked past him toward Buffy. She had had people once? A team of her own that had turned against her? And God, _God_ , they had turned against Jack. They had _shot_ him. 

“Yours did?” If she was in any way disturbed by Jack talking about being killed, it didn’t show.

“Headshot.” 

She winced in sympathy. “Urgh, the migraine makes you want to die all over again, doesn’t it?”

Whatever the Captain might have answered was lost when Gwen suddenly jerked to a complete stop, staring fixedly at – 

\- Bilis.

Buffy let go off Jack, leaving Ianto to keep their esteemed leader on his feet, and stepped up to stand shoulder to shoulder with Gwen. She opened her mouth to speak, but the thing looking like an old man beat her to it.

“From out of the darkness,” it chanted, “he is come. Son of the Great Beast. Cast out before time, chained in rock and imprisoned beneath the Rift.”

“Out of time, huh?” Buffy muttered, seeming unconcerned by the prophecy of doom. “Sounds familiar. You know,” she suddenly spoke out loud, “The last guy doing your job? He was a women hating homicidal maniac, but at least he was _pretty_.”

Gwen jerked so badly she would have fallen if Owen hadn’t caught her around the waist. Tosh asked in a small voice, “You know what’s going on?”

“I know that you’ve been all seeing dead people. Been telling you things, haven’t they? It’s how this works. _Doesn’t it?_ ” Her voice grew in volume and sharpness on the last two words, until they seemed to ring in the empty street. 

The complete team was looking at their second in command sideways, when, out of nowhere, laughter came. It was familiar laughter but with an edge, a familiar voice, an unfamiliar hate in it. Form behind Bilis stepped…Buffy.

“Aw,” the new Buffy cooed, “Little slayer, all grown up. Are you trying to blow my party?”

The other Buffy snorted, “Yeah, right. One hell of a party. You incorporeal, your head sycophant an old geezer with a thing for doomsday poetry and that thing he summoned? Going to die, just like all your other little toys. Just like your _army_.”

“You seem very sure, little slayer. What, no more crying in the dark? No more wanting to die, just to make the pain stop? We had such fun.”

Buffy – the first one, the one standing with the team, not the other, not the second, the evil one, who laughed like her soul was on fire – chuckled. “Hell, I can’t even imagine how _frustrating_ it must be, being trapped in the Void, unable to do more than _talk_.”

Buffy – the other one, the one that was not Buffy at all, scowled, “All hail Abbadon,” it screamed, throwing both arms skyward. “The Great Devourer. The whole world shall die beneath his shadow!” 

Everyone spun to look up at the – thing – that appeared out of nowhere – out of the Rift, the guilty little voices in their heads whispered – and froze in terror. 

All except Buffy who turned back to the empty space where Bilis and fake-Buffy had stood and snarked, “Well look at that, it even has Momma’s horns.”

+

Jack kissed Ianto and winked at Buffy before making Gwen drive him to an open space. Buffy got the rest of the team functional by screaming at them to _get their asses moving_. They were returning to the Hub at a brisk jog, intending to shut down the Rift manipulator to stop any of Abbadon’s potential siblings from popping in for coffee – Buffy’s words. 

“What…” Tosh panted after a minute of running, “was… that?”

The other woman – not out of breath at all, how did she _do_ that – said, “That was the Source of all Evil. Non-corporeal and locked outside this world. Can take the shape of any dead person. Likes to try and end the world. We go back. Abbadon is one of its… spawn. And Bilis its harbinger. It’s nasty, but essentially harmless. Bringing Horny into this world exhausted what little power it had after the last smack down I gave it. Nothing to worry about.”

If anyone doubted the careless assessment, they swallowed that doubt. Jack had been right and they had killed him. They had learned their lesson. 

“You seem very sure,” a voice – that voice, the voice that was usually soft, happy, laughing, cool, suddenly drenched in hate and rage, steeped in darkness – said.

The other Buffy was back, standing with her – its – arms crossed, leaning against the nearest lamp post. Hold on, hadn’t Buffy just said it could only take the form of the dead? 

The slayer stopped and smiled pleasantly. “I am. You have no hold in this world.”

The other pushed off from the post and stepped forward, cold smirk on its lips. It leaned in close and spoke almost into the real Buffy’s hair, “One day, I will be back. And I will bring all of hell with me.”

The serene expression on the real blonde’s face never failed, “I’ll be there. However long it takes, I’ll be there. And I’ll stop you again. I got forever now, remember?”

The smash of Abbadon hitting the ground, dead, shook the entire city and in a flash of light, the apparition disappeared. The spook was over.

+

+

**Punish**

+

When Gwen came back with Jack’s corpse, Buffy bent over him, ruffled his hair, kissed his forehead and then murmured against his cooling skin, “Safe journey.”

Then she straightened and gave them all a hard look, ordering them to work as if nothing was wrong – as if she wasn’t standing over the body of their leader, as if the world hadn’t almost ended, as if she hadn’t just declared war on the _Source of all Evil_ , as if Jack wasn’t dead, as if they hadn’t killed him, as if everything was alright and _Jack wasn’t dead_.

She sent Ianto to Retcon the masses, Gwen to smooth things over with the police and Tosh to check on the Rift. Owen she set to helping her with the clean up. Then she walked into the Captain’s office like she owned the place and started calling up UNIT and the other Torchwoods to tell them that yes, apocalypse averted, everyone was fine. Except - _except_ \- Jack’s cold, still body still lay in the middle of the Hub and he was not fine at all. She spent the next two hours up there because apparently the end of the world caused a hell of a lot of paperwork and if she noticed them bringing Jack down to the morgue and cleaning him up, she didn’t say so. 

But then she called them up over the speakers and ordered them to their posts in a tone of voice that left no doubt that yes, at one point in time, she had had a team and she had lead them with an iron fist. Gwen went to work with tears in her eyes and as soon as the new de facto leader turned her back, she slipped back downstairs.

Buffy kept hounding them, kept putting them to work as if they needed neither sleep nor food and by the second day even Owen had figured out that she was punishing them. 

Gwen finally lost it after she was dragged from the morgue for the fifth time in as many hours and screamed in the other woman’s face, “Give us some time to grieve, for God’s sake!”

Buffy had looked at her with flat, dead eyes and told her, “Traitors don’t get to grieve.”

For the rest of the day, the Hub was silent like a grave – Jack’s grave.

They did their work, they gave the boss the reports she demanded and they always flinched when she walked past them without her customary smile or touch. Torchwood Three had had two souls and now one of them was gone and the other had turned to stone. 

The worst part though, was knowing they deserved it. They had betrayed Jack. They had let loose the thing that had killed him. They had believed what they knew to be apparitions over their leader. They had believed dead people’s words because they had been what they all wanted to hear. A way to fix this. A solution. The lies – no matter how obvious – had been easier than Jack’s truth that there was no solution. It ate at them all, from the inside out. So did the silent truth that if Buffy hadn’t _not_ been entered into the emergency protocol yet by fluke – if she had been needed to open the Rift – they would have killed her, too.

Because they were human and weak and fallible and she and Jack were not. They were more, better, harder. They had not fallen for parlour tricks, had they?

Gwen worked to the clock for the first time since joining the team and she spent most of her nights in the morgue, watching over Jack with an obsession that had even Owen – the neediest of them all – turning twitchy.

Until she brought Jack back, that was. 

She brought him back to hug Tosh and kiss Ianto and forgive Owen and if they weren’t sobbing with relief it was because they were all cried out. 

Buffy simply smiled at him from across the room and said, “Welcome back.”

The peaceful expression on her face caused everyone to stiffen in frantic hope and Jack noticed when Owen went rigid in his arms. He scowled at his second in command over the doctor’s head. “You’ve been giving them the cold shoulder, haven’t you?”

She shrugged and put down the alien device she had been inspecting. “You would have let it go and they would have forgotten what they did. This way, they learned a lesson.”

A lesson? God, they had learned a dozen lessons. _Trust Jack. Don’t mess with the Rift. Actions have consequences. If you fuck up people die._

That was perhaps the hardest lesson. The death toll was high, too high. Hundreds of people were dead. Because of them. Because they had _wanted_. Wanted things that were gone, out of reach, impossible. Things that were lost did not come back just because you wished them to. Except Jack.

Jack who shrugged, grinned and asked for coffee. 

Forgiving them, just like Buffy had predicted.

+

Ianto managed to corner Buffy later in the day and state more than ask, “You knew he was coming back.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t tell us.”

Her eyes flashed back to that hard, flat look and she simply said, “No.”

“To make us understand what we did.”

“Yes.”

It broke out of him then, all the floundering insecurity, the need, the desperation. He had not only lost his lover but his best friend, too, it seemed. He hadn’t felt this raw since… since Buffy had arrived. “Why?”

She looked into his face and hugged him briefly - an apology on her part perhaps. “That’s the thing about immortals, Ianto. We forgive often, but we never forget. I had to make sure you remember, too.”

It was the first time – and probably the last – she ever used that word in conjunction to herself and Jack. Immortal. Ianto filed it away in his head to have a fit about later.

“Why were you so sure he would be back?”

“What are the three inevitabilities in this universe?”

He blinked at her, confused despite the relief still surging through his veins. “Pardon?”

“The three things you can’t escape, no matter where, no matter when, no matter who and what you are. Inevitabilities. What are they?”

He thought for a moment. The first was easy. The second, too, considering what they spent their life policing. “Death. And time. But what is the third?”

She smiled at him, a bit like a proud parent and nodded. “Death and time, yes. Two of the three things that have always existed, will always exist. The only constants in the entire universe.

“The third… is life. Jack is life. And you can’t kill life, can you?”

Could you? 

+

+

**Leave**

+

Jack forgave them, kissed Ianto in front of them – that had to mean something, right, right? – and told them everything was okay.

Then he left.

+

+

**Time III**

+

He came back on New Year’s Eve 1884, thirteen years after he had left her standing in the rain. After he had walked away a hollow man, looking for anything to fill him up – knives and bullets, broken glass and poison wine - anything at all. 

He had died several hundred times since that rainy day and every death had burned another hole into his soul, stolen another part of who he was, wild Jack in tight jeans, hopping around time, mischief always just a step behind.

On New Year’s Eve 1884, he understood the mad little smile Buffy always wore, understood why she laughed too much and cried too little. Understood that sometimes there was only a knife’s edge between cracking a joke and cracking a skull. 

If he was honest, he had understood for a while – since sometime between jumping off a cliff and hanging himself – and with the realization had come the first piece of what used to be Captain Jack Harkness. He had found more pieces since then - a bit of serenity, a lot of black humour and a dash of hope – and used them to slowly, slowly, create something like himself again. 

Why not be wild when there was no risk? Why not be saucy when there was no-one to hurt and nothing to lose? Why not be crazy when the madness sparkled in your eyes anyway? Why not be who you were when everything else was finite? So he laughed again and gambled his life again, slept with anything with a pulse again and pulled a good scam every now and then. 

He lived.

It kept the horrors of the dark hours at bay. 

+

He came back on New Year’s Eve 1884, thirteen years after he had left her standing in the rain. He came back and crashed her party in good old Captain Jack style – sneaking in and causing mischief.

He slipped behind her in the crowded room, wrapped his arms around her waist in a manner that would remain scandalous for another eighty years or so and purred, “Hey there, darling.”

As he did he kept an eye on the two men closest, both in their twenties, boys from the looks of them, dandies. The two ponces froze in outrage and he could hear her annoyed little sigh before she said, “William, Anthony, meet Jack. He’s my brother.”

If she was surprised to see him it didn’t show. 

Then she ripped his hands off her abdomen - almost breaking several fingers in the process - and pulled him around so he was standing by her side. Her smile was a showing of teeth as he bent low, breath grazing her earlobe, whispering, “Your brother now, am I?”

She tucked her arm into his affectionately and pinched the inside of his elbow so hard he was sure he was bleeding.

“Jack,” she chirped and after twenty years of knowing her he could hear the death in her words, “Meet William and Anthony. The gentlemen are wooing me.”

He didn’t laugh. Really, he didn’t. The pain in his arm as her nails dug into his wound was too bad to even think of laughing out loud. Wooing her? Wooing Buffy? He wheezed. Okay, so maybe he _was_ thinking about laughing.

She made excuses he didn’t hear because, damn, she really hadn’t aged _at all_ and dragged him out of the room, everyone’s eyes on their backs. 

As soon as they were out of sight she let go of his arm and asked, “Does it hurt?”

He nodded. She nodded, too. Then she punched him in the jaw hard enough to make him see stars. 

“What the fuck, Jack? You disappear for over a decade and come back _like this_? You’d better be dead drunk or stoned because I swear, if you pulled this shit sober, I’m going to find a way to kill you and make it stick!”

He bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood and looked at her, his face still turned sideways. He grinned but it was touch and go for a moment before the brittleness faded and it became solid. “Aw, come on. You missed me, didn’t you?”

“Missed you?” she snarled, “Of course I did. I was worried sick about you, right until the moment you decided to crash my party and ruin this life! Do you have any idea how long it took to build all this up?”

He snorted, “So what. You got time.”

And she heard, God bless her little heart, she heard the abyss underneath and stilled in her rage. Stilled and listened to the brittle rattling in his chest that was the broken pieces skidding about. 

“Where were you?” she asked, gentler suddenly.

He smiled and it was an honest one, bitter as the blackest coffee. “Trying to kill myself, mostly. Didn’t stick. Went a bit crazy. I’m better now.”

“Really?”

“Hey, better laughing than crying, right? I just gotta hold on until I find the Doctor again. He’ll fix me.”

“Jack,” she said, voice trailing and low, like a blow that you saw coming but couldn’t stop. The end of hope. Her face fell, society girl, angry slayer, annoyed woman, they all slipped away to leave someone with eyes like glass and broken things.

He shook his head wildly and put the smile back on. “So, just how queer are those wooers of yours? Think I stand a chance with the blond? He’s kind of cute in a very…well – “

“Jack.” _Listen to me._

“No.” It wasn’t the mad denial it had been thirteen year ago, not the desperate pleaquestionwishdesirehopepleaseohplease. It was sharper. Surer. No. “Whatever you’re going to say, don’t. I don’t want to hear it. Cardiff, the Rift. That’s where he goes to refuel. And that’s where I’ll be. The original plan. I came to ask if you wanted to come with me.”

She looked at him for a long time. Turned and looked at the door that led to a ballroom that belonged to her. Filled with people she had invited. And two men who wanted to marry her. Have a life with her. Children. It was a joke. A big, fat, cosmic joke. 

And she knew it. Knew it and still wanted it more than she wanted anything else. Because it was normal. It was safe. Square and simple. It could be touched and felt and understood. It wasn’t like reaching for a dying star and watching a world end. Wasn’t like dying and getting back up, like seeing oblivion and losing it. It didn’t make you laugh and cry and go mad. It didn’t. 

That was why she craved it, why Jack craved it. It was why they could never, would never, have it. Because they were the tears and the laughter and the madness, life and death and oblivion. They were the universe.

No-one ever warned him that all gods wanted was to be human.

They were what they were.

_We are what we are_.

“I’m coming with you,” she said and took his hand, pulling him to his feet. He knew that she was already planning their escape. Money and valuables and a bag of clothes. They could be on the road by midnight and damn that normal life. 

But before leading him out of the room she stopped him with a small hand on his chest and looked earnestly up into his eyes. 

“Just for a while.”

For a moment, the rattling in his chest stopped and his smile reached his eyes.

+

+

**Talk**

+

Buffy didn’t move into Jack’s office. She did the paperwork on his desk and she took care of his pet plant projects – at least until they started dying, then Gwen took over – but that was all. 

Gwen pushed for her to take up the office because it was simply easier. All calls went up there, all files were up there. Easier. Buffy snorted and told them that she had messed with Jack’s office once and had no desire to repeat the experience, thanks a lot. 

It made them all happy because she seemed sure, so sure, that Jack would be back and angry too, because he had left and Buffy not filling up his space was a constant reminder of it. 

And Ianto. Ianto was barely holding together, halfway falling apart every time he set foot into the stale, unused office and still trying to keep the pieces glued together. Jack had left. No note, no goodbye, no word, no reason. He had kissed Ianto and half an hour later he had been gone. To the Doctor. Who would fix him. Who he had been waiting for. The archives did not yield dates, but Jack had been here for a long time, waiting. 

The Doctor was Jack’s Lisa and Ianto hated him, loved him, envied him for that. He wanted to scream and keep making coffee for the Captain as if he might come home any moment and then he caught himself thinking that and wondered quietly if this was really home. If it had ever been home for Jack, and Buffy, too. Or was it just another place, another decade wasted? 

They lived forever. Why should this, all of this, mean anything to them. Just because it meant the world for him? No, he was not arrogant enough to believe that. And so he fell to pieces. 

“Why are you so sure he will be back?” It slipped out as he refilled the blonde’s coffee cup and he bit his tongue hard, but the words were spoken.

She looked up from her paperwork, putting her pen down and crossing her arms as she leaned back. For an endless minute she stared at him, inscrutable. Then she said, “Because the Doctor can’t give him what he wants.”

And that was when the floor sort of dropped out of the world and everything went wonky for a moment. Ianto blinked. “That was not very reassuring.”

She shrugged and pushed away from the desk, putting her feet up on it. “Nope. But I figured you’d want the truth. Jack’s been hunting a ghost for the past however many years. What he wants, he can never have. He’ll be back.”

She tried to hide it, she always did, but he heard the ache in her words, the bitter tinge and aftertaste. Jack had put his ghosts above her, hadn’t he? “You sound…”

What was the easiest word for angrydisappointedjadedwearytiredpatientneedy?

“I know. Sorry. It’s just… I told him. Ages ago. But he didn’t believe me. Had to hear it from the Doctor’s lips. My word wasn’t good enough.” _I wasn’t good enough._

Ianto put down the coffee pot he was still holding, smoothed his tie and said very carefully, “Sometimes, Jack looks lost.”

Surprise. He considered it a treat, to garner that reaction from her. “It was why I could not hate him for what happened with Lisa,” – only the slightest hitch in his voice – “He looked lost afterwards. I tell myself that it is alright that he left, if it takes that look from his face.”

“Blind faith and unconditional love, huh? You are a very smart man, Ianto Jones.” 

He flinched at the word love, just a bit, because that was a label neither of the men had ever applied to their relationship. She noticed, smiled slightly, but did not comment. Instead she went on – words pouring from her like water from a fountain and Ianto realized that she was like him, pieces and glue and the need to _talk_ , to tell someone and have them understand. 

“And stupid, too. Just like me. Loving crazy Jack Harkness. I spent a hundred and forty years with him, you know? I left the Doctor for him, gave up travelling. Mostly, anyway. For him. My mad, wonderful Jack. It wasn’t enough to make him believe me.”

He found it hard to believe that Jack would be so blind, so callous, but then, he had left, hadn’t he? To chase his pipe dream, leaving them all behind, floundering, trying to just keep going. “Then why did you stay?”

A sardonic twist to her lips, “Love’s bitch all the way. That’s me.”

He nodded slightly – a thank you maybe, for sharing this with him, for giving him truth instead of hope and opening up in a way she never had before – and picked up his pot of coffee. Below, Owen was hollering for his next fix. 

He was almost out the door when she spoke again. “He won’t find what he’s looking for between the stars. He’ll come back for you.”

_Not for me._

Ianto promised himself that the first thing he would do if – when – he saw the Captain again, was punch him in the face for being such an arsehole to a woman who loved him so obviously. 

Then he spun on his heel and asked on impulse, “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight? Outside the Hub? From real plates?”

She chuckled, shook her head. Then she nodded. 

+

+

**Agree**

+

“I asked to see the Captain,” Detective Kathy Swanson said as one of Torchwood walked toward her, wind from the Bay whipping her blonde hair around her face. 

The other woman – the one who lay next to corpses and whispered in their ear – shrugged as she came to a halt, leaning on the railing, looking out at the water. “The Captain is unavailable.”

“Where is he?”

A vague gesture upwards, “He’s gone to touch the stars.”

Kathy wondered if that was a euphemism of some kind – if the man was dead – or if she was just being had. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

A quirk of the lips let her know that yes, she was being had. “Just what it says. Why did you ask to meet me?”

The taller woman considered pointing out that she had not asked to meet the blonde, but the Captain, but in the end swallowed the comment and held out a brown file, gone limp in the humid air. 

“What’s that?”

“Twelve dead people. Killed over the past year, all in the same way, by some large animal ripping out their throat. Every time you showed up and every time my people were told to scamper off. I want to know the truth.”

“Why would I tell you?”

“If you don’t, I’ll tell the newspapers. People are dying. And as far as I can tell, you aren’t doing shit about it.”

There was no reaction, no yelling, no threats. The blonde just stood there, looking too young to be anything but a college student, staring. Only, she wasn’t staring. She was… measuring.

“What?” Kathy finally snapped, angry with herself to bending to someone half her age.

“I’m trying to figure out whether you’re a risk worth taking or a threat to be rid off.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Through her windswept blonde hair, she actually looked startled at being called out, as if she wasn’t used to being questioned. At least not in this tone of voice. Her eyebrows rose in a peculiar way but finally she quirked a smile and said, “You’re smart. You’re fast on your feet. You’re stubborn. I’m trying to assess whether those are useable qualities, or annoying ones.”

And then, for another five terribly annoying and strangely gut wrenching minutes, Kathy stood and awaited judgement, like a naughty child – wanting to run but spell bound by the gaze resting upon her, by the weight of the words that would follow, the testing of boundaries and the pushing against them. 

“Buffy,” the blonde suddenly said and Kathy jerked so badly she almost dropped the file. 

She made a noise that was half question half curse and received a smile for her troubles. “My name. Buffy. Use it. And come on, you’re getting your wish.”

“What’s that?” she asked even as she followed the – Buffy – toward the Plass.

“Torchwood.” Then Buffy spoke to thin air, informing, “Ianto, we’re coming down. Tourist entrance. Yes. Hide the porn.”

Kathy snorted and after noticing the sideway look she was getting elaborated, “You people really are sexed up.”

“Well, this is an organization run by _Jack_ , so yeah. But mostly, we’re just comfortable with each other.”

She spoke and then pulled Kathy onto a slab of rock and made them disappear into the ground. The police officer tried not to gawk and failed horribly. The place looked like an anarchist hideout, complete with empty pizza boxes, high tech work stations and crazy decorations. In the end she forced herself to look at her companion and nowhere else to avoid looking like a gaping tourist. Said companion was smiling again – a default expression, defence mechanism, _look how harmless I am_ \- and looking all too smug. 

“Welcome to Torchwood. Outside the government, beyond the police. Fighting aliens because no-one else’s up for the job and arming the human race for the shit that will be the twenty first century. Please watch the pterodactyl and try not to get killed on our time.”

After that, things just got weirder.

+

“Let me get this straight,” Kathy said three hours later, sitting in a chair in the conference room and feeling somewhat weak kneed. There really was a pterodactyl. And aliens. And vaguely humanoid things called Weevils that were, apparently the ‘wild animals’ the police was looking for. And Doctor Harper did not just stitch up people, but cut up alien corpses and Dr. Sato was not only a genius, but one that worked with a computer mainframe that was not yet invented. They had given her the grand tour, explained as little as possible and, she was sure, taken pictures of her stupefied expressions.

“You fight aliens.”

“Only if they do something bad. If they’re harmless, we let them go on their merry way.”

“You _fight aliens_.” It must have been the twentieth time she repeated that sentence by now and Buffy rolled her eyes, sighed and simply nodded her head. Yes, they fought aliens. Okay, Kathy told herself, she could work with that. She had seen it. She knew it was true. She just needed a moment to - _aliens_. 

In the end she decided to switch her brain off and stop _thinking_. Stop thinking and start acting. She picked up the cup of coffee that a nice young man in a suit had put in front of her despite her protests that she preferred tea, thank you. He had given her a straight face and informed her that she would need some strong coffee for the conversation to come. He had been right.

“You work outside the system?”

“Yes.”

“Completely?”

“No-one’s completely outside the system. But the kind of leeway we have would make you green with envy.”

“Okay. Why did you show me all this? I am not naïve enough to think that you did it simply to satisfy my curiosity.”

Dr. Sato – call me Toshiko – who was hanging in the doorway with Harper – Doctor, if you please – held out her hand with a gleeful smile. He put five pounds into her waiting palm and grumbled under his breath. Buffy gave them both a look that was so very maternal it could only be described as, “Scoot, go play elsewhere.”

They left, Harper cursing, Sato giggling and Buffy idly sat on the table, putting her feet on a chair nearby. She was obviously not one for manners. Or protocol. She reached behind her and picked up a file that she slapped on the table in front of the police officer with little care. 

Kathy opened it and read the first few lines. It was a report about Officer Walter James, killed in the line of duty three months earlier. She remembered the case, grimaced and closed the file. “So?”

“So, he’s the reason you’re here. He discovered a _deformed animal_ and called it in. We took over, told him to keep the civilians away and stand down. He said, ‘bloody Torchwood’ and went to solve the problem. The so called animal was a Hoix. They eat everything they can get their hands on but are completely harmless. If he hadn’t provoked it, he would still be alive. 

“We need you to be our liaison. Not to send cases our way. That direction is all worked out. But the other way round. We need cred with the police. Someone who tells people that we are not the enemy, who enforces what we say. You are high enough in the food chain to make people listen. If you tell them we know what we do, there might not be another Walter James.” 

“What if I refuse to be your… enforcer?”

A Gaellic shrug. “Toshiko has already hacked your computers and deleted everything you had on us. Gwen should by now be done with your apartment as well. If you refuse our offer, we will make you forget everything you learned today and let you go.”

Kathy felt something icy sliding along her spine. Hacked computers? Raiding her flat? Making her forget? Who were those people? Police training kicked in once again and she heard herself say, “I told someone where I am.”

“No, you didn’t. We checked your phone records and CCTV. You haven’t told anyone. Kathy, we’re not out to get you. But what we do here is important. We can’t let you jeopardise that. Say the word and we make you forget. You get to go, no strings attached. We don’t have a pile of bodies in the basement…. Well, actually we do, but that’s another story.”

Bodies in the basement. Bodies. In the basement. There was a part of Kathy Swanson that was not hardened by gruesome things, a part that wanted nothing more than to run screaming. But another, larger part of her, the part that had been to Walter James’s funeral, the part that had seen those ripped up bodies, said something else. It said that she could not let go of this. She could not turn her back on a threat just because she was scared. She could not walk away. Not from this. Not even if she would not remember walking away. She knew. Here and now, she knew. And she could help. 

That meant she had to.

So Kathy found herself nodding and agreeing to help a bunch of genius madmen and women chasing aliens. 

+

+

**Giggle**

+

“That went surprisingly well,” Buffy said to no-one in particular after releasing Kathy back into the world. 

“You think it will work out?” That was Toshiko speaking from behind her computer terminal. 

Buffy shrugged and dragged Owen’s chair across the open space between work stations to settle next to the other woman. “Probably. She’s too much of a hero to fuck with us, now that she knows we’re the good guys.”

Tosh applied the finishing touch to yesterday’s review of Rift activity and then clicked half a dozen windows shut before turning around to face her superior. “You sound very cynical when you say things like that.”

“I’ve been around, Tosh. Eventually it’s hard not to be cynic. Especially when you’ve been mixed up with Torchwood for a hundred years.”

“That long?”

“Give or take.”

There was a beat of silence while the technician sipped cold coffee and Buffy just sat very still, eyes almost closed. She was tired again. Since Jack had left, she had been doing his job on top of her own and it was showing.

“Can I ask you something?”

One green eye opened and she answered with a grin to soften the blow, “You can ask. I might not answer.”

“You and Jack, you have some way to travel through time, right?” It wasn’t that hard to put the clues together, if you were looking for them and worked on the assumption that Jack did not make up all those tall tales.

Buffy carefully did not acknowledge the question in any way, waiting to see where it was going. Toshiko wondered if being so paranoid was a prerequisite for being immortal, or a consequence of it. “Then why have you been here for so long? You could go anywhere, any _when_. And you keep telling us how much you hate Cardiff weather.”

The other woman relaxed and visibly shrugged her shoulders. “It’s complicated.”

Toshiko snorted delicately, “This is Torchwood. Of course it’s complicated.”

“Jack came here because he knew the Doctor would drop by eventually. But something about the jump went wrong and he ended up in 1869, years earlier than we agreed on. And the machine allowing him to travel through time short circuited. He was stuck. I found him after some jumping around and decided to stick with him because gods know, Jack without supervision is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Why didn’t you use your… machine?”

“Mine short circuited a long time ago. I got it fixed by a friend who didn’t quite trust me – or anyone else, really - to not mess up time. He tweaked it so there’s a weight limit on it. It doesn’t transport more than one person anymore. I took the occasional side trip over the past century, but usually I stuck around. Especially once Jack got back to his original plan of waiting in Cardiff and Torchwood got its claws into him.”

“You stayed for Jack.” It might have sounded like judgement coming from anyone else but this was Toshiko Sato, who had spent the past four years pining after a man too grumpy and angry with the world to even notice her. If anyone understood, she did.

“For Jack, yes.”

“That’s…”

Buffy shook her head suddenly and grimaced, “Can we not have this conversation? I already had it with Ianto and it dragged me down enough to make him feel bad and invite me for dinner.”

Yes, Tosh understood. She let the subject drop without another word and put her cup down gently – far away from all her tech equipment. They had all been taught that Toshiko knew no mercy when it came to liquids near her station and she stuck to her own rule religiously. “Ianto invited you to dinner?”

“I was maudlin. Guess he was trying to cheer me up.”

“When Ianto tries to cheer you up he puts chocolate sprinkles on your coffee. He doesn’t invite you to dinner.”

“Oh.” It was a slow sort of ‘oh’, the kind that meant someone had just realized something and was not quite willing to admit it yet. The kind of ‘oh’ Torchwood did not do often.

“Why are you so surprised? You are his best friend. Which, by the way,” she added almost as an afterthought, “Is something you stole from me and I considered disliking you for it.”

For someone so old and world weary, Buffy could be surprisingly clueless sometimes because she shot up straight in her chair and babbled, “Oh gods, Tosh, I never even realized. I am so sorry, I mean, I –“

“I said,” Tosh corrected, patting her on the arm, “That I considered disliking you. Then I decided against it.”

“Why?” 

Ianto had been Tosh’s friend first. Even when he had still been hiding Lisa in the basement and stayed aloof, Tosh had snuck in under the wire. He was smart like her, and quiet and he liked watching people, studying them. He liked not being noticed but noticing. After Lisa, Toshiko had been at a loss. The Ianto she had known was gone and in his place was a broken thing. The week after Lisa’s death had been horrible, watching a walking corpse, watching how his reactions were all off, how he was so very inside out, just trying to keep the pieces together. Buffy had fixed that, somehow. That was why Tosh could never be mad at her for taking over as Ianto’s best friend. She had fixed him.

“Because we’re all family, right?”

Buffy cocked her head to one side, contemplating the concept. Family. As if it was a foreign thing.

“Well, a dysfunctional family. I’m in love with Owen, Owen slept with Gwen, who is a bit in love with Jack and a lot in love with Rhys. And Ianto likes Jack and sleeps with him and you like Jack, too, but don’t sleep with him and Owen has a bit of a crush on you and Ianto likes you, too, and Jack flirts with us all and so it’s really a mess, but we’re family.” 

The blonde laughed a bit and chirped, “The crazy things people do when living on the edge.”

Tosh smiled, too, and added, “I think it’s the adrenaline.”

“Makes you horny,” came the agreement and then they both looked at each other and burst out laughing. Not because the joke was very funny, but because they both understood it and knew so much more than what was being said. Because sometimes they didn’t get to laugh enough and cried too much and they really were family. So they laughed.

Owen came up from the medical bay to find out what was going on and eyed them sceptically, as if not quite sure they weren’t contagious. 

Then the girls both looked at him with bright eyes and told him, “We love you, Owen!”

“Okay,” he observed, turning on his heel and walking out.

Life at Torchwood, Toshiko decided as she caught her breath and Buffy went back to being the boss and signing papers, was sometimes horrible and often gruesome and a lot scary. But it was also in many ways the best thing that could happen to a person because another group as tight knit as Torchwood three was probably hard to find.

Where else did people routinely risk their lives for each other and then go for pizza, making the person with the least injuries pay, just because? 

Jack had saved her, but Torchwood was home.

+

+

**Time IV**

+

Alice couldn’t help but be quite spellbound by the man who kept introducing himself as Captain Jack Harkness. He was funny, careless and strong with an intensity underneath that could eat worlds. 

Emily hated him. Of course she did. Emily ran Torchwood Three with an iron fist. Rules, everything was about rules. And the rules stated that everything not human was to be killed on sight. And Harkness was not human. At least not quite. But neither could he be killed. It was an… inconvenience. One that Emily used and used well. A tool. A weapon. 

Only Alice could not quite manage to keep that in mind when hunting through late night Cardiff with said tool and she knew Charles couldn’t either. There was a _vibrancy_ about Harkness that made you dizzy and the idea of him, the concept of living _forever_ , was spellbinding. He would remember them in a hundred years, a thousand years. And the things he knew, even now….

Emily and Charles had spent most of the past week puzzling over an artefact that had come through the Rift, unable to identify what it did. Then Harkness had walked past them and offhandedly remarked that they were too old to be playing with rattles. That was what it was, an alien rattle. Emily had almost exploded with rage but he had simply smiled and walked out. Knowing. Smiling. So much more than any of them could fathom.

So yes, Alice really could not help herself.

When the alarm went off, Emily told them to take Harkness along in much the same way one asked someone to walk the dog. He had followed, grimacing and checking his gun, mouth running as always.

Ten minutes later they reached the spot of activity just in time to watch three strangely shaped creatures disappear around a street corner and Harkness – in typical Harkness fashion - took off after the things without asking for orders. Charles rolled his eyes but readily followed after the other man, Alice only a few steps behind.

They rounded the same corner to find their fellow hunter running flat out, without his weapon drawn. Alice and Charles – who did know and obey rules – stopped running and started shooting, emptying their guns into the creatures with absolutely no results. 

Harkness was at least a hundred yards ahead of them when he called back, “Not going to work! Come on!”

Bullets did not work on those creatures. That was why he had not gone for his gun. It was one of those things that fascinated Alice so. How did he _know_ that? She started running again, Charles beside her this time, knowing that they had no chance of catching up anymore. 

But then the aliens took a wrong turn and ended up in a cul-de-sac with no route of escape and Harkness standing in the mouth of the alley, coat flapping behind him in a nonexistent breeze. 

“Krnlins,” he informed them as they came to a gasping halt on either side of him, “Sort of rubbery. Go for dismemberment.”

Then he flung himself at the middle one, leaving the two other aliens for Alice and Charles to take care of with no further information. That too, was typical Harkness fashion.

Charles followed the other man into the fray while Alice stayed back to keep the fight contained. It worked just fine until the third creature came for her, claws and teeth extending out of nowhere. Of all aliens she had seen, this one probably wasn’t the most frightening. It was green, only five feet tall, a bit frog shaped. But the claws it now sported seemed very, very frightening. 

She froze for one critical second and it cost her. She landed flat on her back with no useable weapon within reach, the thing sitting on top of her, lowering its teeth toward her face with slow, deadly precision. The men were busy with their own fights. There was no help and Alice had learned early not to scream because it drew attention. She struggled to bring her arms up, to shield her face, anything at all, but she knew she would die. 

She would die in a cul-de-sac, flat on her back, staring at the stars, after only two years at Torchwood. The thing above her screeched, high-pitched and grating and opened its mouth wider still, pointy teeth impossibly close and then – 

Nothing. 

Alice opened her eyes to find herself freed of the alien. In fact, the alien was slumped against a wall, looking dazed. Above her, another woman stood. She was blonde, small and smiling. Alice scrambled to her feet, ready to start making up an explanation when she noticed Charles’s crumpled form a few feet off and all thought of keeping cover went out the window as she went to her knees next to him, hands pressing against the claw marks on his chest to staunch the blood flow. 

He looked at her through pain glazed eyes and gasped, “Harkness…”

Harkness, God in heaven! She whipped her head around, expecting to find the man dead. Instead he stood back to back with the blonde woman, both working to keep the three creatures off them. They each had a dagger in hand, Alice noticed and were slicing at anything that came within range.

“Damn it,” the woman suddenly snarled, jerking her arm upwards, “That was my favourite dress!”

Her accent was American.

Harkness cringed visibly then asked as if he were not in the middle of a fight for his life, “I thought that was the green one?”

The blonde stabbed at a clawed hand that tried to grab her around the waist and hit home, ramming her weapon through what passed for the alien’s lower arm. It jerked back howling. “Jack, you ruined the green one three months ago when you got alien goo all over it!”

Harkness dodged a swipe and a set of teeth, kicked one creature’s legs out from under it and then barked a strange, foreign word that made the woman behind him duck without question. The third alien went flying over their heads, carried by the momentum of its own attack. “Oops? Have you got fire?”

“Sure,” the woman answered snidely, “Just let me check my purse. Knife!”

Her command was obeyed instantly as Harkness flung the knife over his shoulder at an angle that allowed her to catch it easily. She did so without looking, spread her arms wide and stabbed the alien into the neck with both daggers at once. It struggled for a moment then went limp as she pulled her weapons back out. 

“One down,” she announced easily as she handed back the blade. Alice meanwhile found some of her Torchwood training and started digging through her pockets for the requested fire.

She found her lighter and called, “Catch,” before throwing it at Harkness. He missed it because he had to avoid being sliced into pieces but the woman’s hand shot out blindly and caught it out of mid air.

“Who’re the kids?” she asked conversationally as she ducked below Harkness’s arm to aid him.

“Torchwood,” he said shortly as he accepted the Alice’s lighter from her. Alice and Charles both gaped at the man. Secrecy! 

But the woman seemed unfazed. She merely gave the two of them a quick once over and then said, “Oh, dear.”

Then Harkness finally got the lighter working and jabbed it into one alien’s eye, setting it on fire like it was filled with paper and kerosene. The second caught fire from the first and soon both were shrieking loudly as they burned. Both fighters relaxed, the woman wiping both blades clean on her ruined sleeve and tucking them away while Harkness dragged the third carcass over to the other and set it on fire, too. 

Then he threw the lighter back at Alice who caught it and he leaned against a wall to watch the bonfire. The woman joined him and for a moment both of them just stood there, catching their breath.

Then the woman said, “I hate Krnlins.”

“Me too. Good thing you were around. The kids aren’t bad but…”

She made a noncommittal noise and answered, “I was actually came to tell you I’m leaving town for a while.”

“Where to?”

“You got mixed up in Torchwood, Jack. That’s all sorts of bad. Can’t very well leave now, can I?”

“I’m a big boy.”

Another snort. Then silence. Alice helped Charles sit up and pour some alcohol from his flask over his wounds. He looked better already. Then he stood and Alice looked at the two people standing a few feet away. Looked and remembered how they had killed superior numbers without breaking a sweat, how they worked as a unit. How they did not flinch, or hesitate. Did not land weaponless on their backs, getting ready to die.

Harkness, she thought, was funny, careless and strong with an intensity underneath that could eat worlds. But he was also more. He fought like someone who had seen war and pain. He faced death with callous disregard. Nothing seemed to faze him. 

He did not flinch. 

He was a creature out of some fairy tale, and his companion, too. They were amazing, bright, shining heroes, people filled with energy and life. Vibrant, yes. Amazing. Spellbinding, enchanting, beautiful and vicious.

They were, Alice thought, something that Torchwood shoulder never, never have messed with. Because for all their beauty and life, they were deadly things.

Between the two groups, the corpses sizzled and burned.

+

+

**Date**

+

When Ianto stepped into Jack’s office and looked so sheepish it was almost funny, Buffy knew that whatever news he was bringing, she would not like it. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked as she leaned back in the too big chair. She would have exchanged it for another one but she only did paperwork up here and there was a part of her that balked at replacing Jack’s things. He would be back. Just like she always was. 

Ianto closed the door and leaned against it, grimacing openly now. Uh-oh. “My mother has… requested my presence for dinner.”

“If you don’t want to go I can come up with some emergency for you to take care of no problem.” She knew all about mothers, how one loved them and wanted to strangle them at the same time. She remembered that much of her mortal days. Actually, she remembered too much of her mortal days.

The young man shook his head, then shrugged. “I already used work as an excuse the last four times. I really should go. But I was hoping…”

Ianto, unsure. There was a rare sight. She just waited. He would tell her what he needed. She had faith in him. 

“I was hoping you would accompany me as my cover date. It would pacify my mother and she is bound to lay into me because of my ‘job’ at the tourist office anyway. Ma’am.”

A cover date. While she was, of course not unfamiliar with the concept, the phrase was new. And amusing. And the title tagged onto the statement made it very clear just how nervous he was. He hadn’t called her that in months. She smiled. “A cover date?”

Ianto flushed but his expression smoothed as he remembered that he was supposed to be unflappable. Then he gathered his courage and she tried to recall the feeling of being young, so young, and wonderfully unsure about her place in the order of things. She couldn’t. Not quite. “If that is not acceptable to you, it could be a real date.”

What had Tosh told her? Ianto didn’t invite moping people to dinner, he gave them chocolate sprinkles? She hadn’t quite believed the other woman. Not after Jack. Because if anyone knew how Jack got under your skin, took you over and ruined you for eternity, it was her – oh, yes, her, who fell for a mortal man with charisma and charm and easy laughter and stayed with an immortal when he broke himself to pieces and struggled on because _they were what they were_ and there was no escape, the one who stuck around to see this wonderful century, see him become like he was again, a man, full of wonderful things. 

But looking at the archivist now – young and mortal and already worn beyond belief, so old inside – she thought that perhaps she had underestimated how bright her own flame must seem to some people. Jack burned bright as an exploding sun but in many ways, she was like him, wasn’t she? Perhaps that was what Ianto craved, the flame, the heat. The mystery and silence, the heavy pauses that sometimes happened. 

No. Ianto was not like that. He was… more. More than any human she had met since… Rose, probably. And Buffy understood why the Doctor kept companions, kept those mortal souls close and warmed himself on their humanity. She looked at the young man standing in front of her and she _understood_. She could not begrudge him Rose anymore. 

So she nodded. “A real date. Been a while since I had one of those. I might mess up.”

Fair warning. Ianto smiled and inclined his head slightly. “I don’t think you will. Tomorrow then, at eight. Shall we meet here?”

She nodded. “Where are we going?”

“The Silver Lantern.” Formal dress. She would have to go shopping. 

“I’ll get Owen and Tosh to be on standby. That should give us the evening off. And…” She trailed off, catching herself just in time and returned to her paperwork in obvious dismissal of him. He took the hint and left. The door, as was customary, remained open behind him. Open for anyone to come in whenever they pleased. 

This was not her office. It was Jack’s. Jack would be back. But perhaps things would not be exactly as Jack had left them. Maybe she should go and fetch herself a more comfortable chair from the conference room.

+

+

**Balance**

+

As far as timing went, Rhiannon Jones had picked the date for her family dinner rather well. The Rift was quiet, they hadn’t had an apocalypse in two weeks – meaning all bruises were mostly healed up – and weren’t due for another crisis for at least three more weeks. It was all peachy. 

Except. Except that the last date Buffy had been on had happened more than seven years ago when Jack had been feeling frisky enough to take her out dancing. She had a mild panic attack around noon – because she liked Ianto and she did not want to make everything worse by being American and clueless and very, very unused to the simple things in life – and it took Tosh to calm her down.

Tosh, with her gentle words and hands, who took her out for lunch – no coffee, she had had too much of that already – and helped her buy a nice dress and gave her a crash course on dating and meeting parents in the twenty-first century. Buffy had never, never, felt so out of place and time as she did while Toshiko babbled. Facing Daleks? No problem. Watching planets crash into dust, sure. But here, now, in her own time, she felt lost. It hurt, in a way. 

But then Ianto came up from the Hub to meet her in the tourist office and saw her in her new, pale green dress and the way he gawked made everything alright again because apparently she hadn’t lost her touch completely. There was still life in those old bones. Still more than just fighting and dying and going on because there was nothing else. More than just Jack.

He was still wearing the same suit he had worn all day but the shirt underneath was crisp and fresh and dark purple. It matched her green dress just so and as she caught their reflection in the car windows she actually giggled. 

“What’s funny?” he asked, looking at her with those old eyes. She suspected that he knew already, or had at least been told by Tosh to take it easy on the crazy girl.

“I’m gods know how old and I feel like I’m sixteen again. Only when I was sixteen I wasn’t dating because I was busy trying not to die so…” She trailed off, realizing that she was talking herself into foreign territory. They had never talked about her childhood before, had never actually gotten past, ‘I was somewhere else and now I’m here’.

“You will do fine.” 

She decided to believe him.

+

She did do fine for the most part. Rhiannon – Ianto’s mother – was happy to see her on her son’s arm, even if she was called Buffy and had an American accent that even a century in Britain could not tame. Alis – the sister – was a kind person, loud and lively and mostly occupied with her six-year-old son Glynn, who apparently hated being dressed up for dinner. Alis’ husband James seemed to reserve judgment. They started the evening off commenting on each others’ names – the Jones’ liked traditional ones and where, please, did ‘Buffy’ come from - and then the ice was mostly broken. Ianto’s father was not mentioned and she managed not to ask about him. She remembered reading something about a car accident in the files.

Mrs. Jones waited until they were on their main course to start hitting heavy. “So, Buffy,” she asked, “What do you think about Ianto’s job?”

“Well,” she answered after swallowing, “It’s pretty convenient, since I work there, too.”

“Really?” Alis demanded, “I thought manning that office was a one man job.”

Glynn poked his potatoes like they were alive and Buffy shrugged. “There’s more to it than just the office. We do research, that kind of thing. There’s a few of us.” It was the official cover story, and she saw no harm in building on that. 

James snorted and tried to cover it up by taking a sip off his wine. “Americans in charge of Welsh tourism. How did it come to this?”

Ianto finally decided to come to the rescue. “Buffy has been here for a long time. She knows the city as well as we do.” Which was not too surprising, considering that she had been haunting in on and off for a hundred years. Her Welsh wasn’t too bad, either. Mostly.

“Oh, what brought you over here, then?”

Ianto made a motion as if to cut his sister off, but Buffy took his hand below the table and smiled ruefully. “My mother died when I was in college. I dropped out to take care of my sister. After she took off I sort of… drifted. Started travelling. Landed here and liked it.”

Ianto’s hand in hers went slack as he looked at her in surprise. He knew what she looked like when she was bullshitting and he knew she was telling the truth now. Well, a very condensed version of the truth. It was more than she had ever told about her life before. More than even Jack knew, in some ways. 

She smiled brightly at him and squeezed his fingers. She would tell him later. The other women at the table were starting to notice their moment and that wouldn’t do. So Buffy turned to Glynn and asked brightly, “Tell me, Glynn, how good of an uncle is Ianto?”

That served the derail the conversation for a while. 

Ordering dessert made Buffy very glad for her crazy metabolism but she turned down coffee. “Ianto’s coffee is the only coffee that passes these lips,” she told them with a smile.

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say because Rhiannon immediately turned to her son and asked in a rather disappointed-this-better-not-be-true voice, “You make coffee at work?”

Like it was a bad thing. Like Ianto was a secretary and a shop boy and nothing more. Secret identities sucked, more so when you cared about the people you had to lie to. So Buffy waved his answer off and put on her best smile. “Well, he has to. The boss is addicted and utterly unable to make it himself, Tosh drinks only tea, Owen almost blew up the machine the one time he tried and Gwen and my coffee will raise the dead. Ianto is our only hope of surviving each day.”

Mrs. Jones looked sceptical but in the end just shook her head. “It’s just that, my Ianto is such a smart boy. He could do so much better than his job. In London he was junior researcher, has he ever told you that?” She turned to look at her son, sadness in her eyes, “I just wish you would use your life to do great things, Ianto. I was always sure you would.”

Ianto, back stiff and hands clenched around his water glass said, “I am sorry, Mother.” 

Nothing more.

That was when the screaming started.

+

+

**Take**

+

It was perhaps a sign of how damn used they were to chaos because the entire Jones clan reacted faster to the screams than Buffy and Ianto. They were just too used to the sound to still register it as out of the ordinary. 

But then Glynn started screaming, too, and Alis’s eyes went impossibly wide and whipping around to see what was going on behind them was kind of inevitable. 

Standing in the doorway, menacing the maitre’d with bared fangs, were two Weevils. The people in the vicinity of the entrance were starting to panic, their only route of escape blocked by something they could not even begin to identify. One man was bleeding on the floor and a single look at the puddle of blood was enough to let Buffy know he was as good as dead. His throat was gone. 

But, as people crowded together, the level of adrenaline rising in the room, the Weevil’s left the maitre’d alone with the table he was hiding behind and went – for the food. Great, _hungry_ Weevils. Probably drawn by the smell of the food. Murphy really had it in for the members of Torchwood Three. 

With a sigh and a curse she went for her purse and dug out a stun gun and a regular one. She held both out to Ianto, who picked the regular gun, as expected. The stun gun meant you had to get closer to use it and Buffy was the one who did close range combat. 

Then Ianto stood, climbing on his chair and called in his best believe-me-I-know-what-I’m-doing voice, “Everyone, this is Torchwood. Stay calm and don’t make any sudden movements. Do not draw attention to yourselves!”

As Buffy dumped her purse on the table she caught a glimpse of the faces of his family and what she saw was a mix between shock, disbelief and - pride? Well, the wayward son had made something of his life after all. Who knew. 

Then they were both moving toward the Weevils, splitting up without a word. Ianto clicked the safety off the gun and pulled a can of Weevil spray out of nowhere while Buffy fired up the stun gun. They both moved carefully so they got within range of their targets at the same time and with a last look exchanged, they moved.

Buffy took a step into a semi-open space between abandoned tables and called, “Hey, pretty.”

The Weevil jerked around and looked at her hungrily. She smiled prettily and kicked it in the stomach, making it double over, and quickly slid forward to apply the stun gun to its neck and squeeze. It dropped to the ground like a sack of bones and she turned to see Ianto had his own by the scruff of its boiler suit and was liberally dousing it with spray. He hadn’t used his gun. For someone who wore suits and called himself a glorified secretary, he was scarily efficient in the field. 

They exchanged another look as Buffy tapped the earpiece she never went anywhere without and said, “Owen, you there?”

“Yep. What’s up? Teaboy dumped you?”

Judging from Ianto’s expression, he had returned the little button to his ear as well sometime during the excitement. “No I did not, Owen,” he replied as he clicked the safety of the gun back on and went hunting through his pockets for plastic ties.

“Get two Weevil kits and a whole lot of Retcon to the Silver Lantern, now, would you? Ambulance, too. And no smart-assing or you’re Riftsitting for the rest of your natural life.”

“Want Tosh to jam the place?” He was asking if she wanted Toshiko to block all communication to and especially from the restaurant. 

“Yes.”

Owen and Toshiko were working their end and Buffy refocused on hers in time to catch the bundle of ties Ianto threw her way. Half a minute later both Weevils were tied up into neat packages ready to be carted off as soon as Owen arrived with the SUV. 

She threw the stun gun at Ianto who caught it and zapped his dazed prisoner for good measure. Once they were both out cold they laid them out next to each other and placed a cloth from an upturned table over their still forms. It was as discrete as it was going to get for now. 

Around them people were still stiff with terror and the stench of fear and the slayer figured they had about one more minute before people started snapping out of it and getting annoying. By silent agreement, both Torchwood members made their way back to their party who all still sat where they had been left, unmoving. Over her shoulder, Buffy threw one last regretful look at the dead man in the door. There was nothing she could do now and someone was already at his side. 

“Are you alright?” Ianto asked his mother, worry lacing his tone.

The matriarch nodded mechanical, then asked, “Did you just… is that… are you? When did you learn to use a gun?”

Ianto smiled, patted his mother on the shoulder and said, “First day on the job.”

James laughed at that and demanded, “All that crap about Torchwood that’s floating around the net, it’s true?”

Buffy shrugged, “Some of it. We control what’s put on but leave the outrageous stuff for fun.”

Alis turned to look at her brother. Her son was sitting on her lap, staring at his uncle in wide eyed wonder. “And you are part of it?” Alis wanted to know.

Ianto nodded.

Glynn giggled, “Do you hunt aliens, Uncle Ianto?”

“I even catch them.”

Buffy smiled at his answer and quietly excused herself to babysit the prisoners until the rest of the team arrived. Tosh would keep catching anything that tried to leave the building, Owen would pack up the Weevils and work up a cover story for the dead man. Ianto would make sure everyone got a drink before they left. Against the germs those alien carried. With a hint of Retcon in it. After that they would check all cell phones and cameras, destroy all evidence and cook up another cover story for why close to fifty people had fallen asleep in a restaurant.

Ianto’s family would be four of those people. They would forget this evening, would forget everything he told them now with a smile on his face and such obvious relief. But for tonight, for the next few hours, he could speak the truth. He could tell them all about the crazymaduglywonderful things he had to keep bottled up normally. He could be what Buffy had never managed with her own family. 

Free.

Their eyes met across the room and the smile he sent her was bright with quiet joy, tainted with the knowledge that it was all temporary and it broke her heart just a tiny bit. Maybe, she thought, they would let the Joneses go home. Feed them the Retcon in their own beds. 

Give Ianto a few more hours of this illusion.

+

+

**Dine**

+

Tosh was thoughtfully picking on her curry, enjoying the rare moment of silence in the Hub. Gwen was at home, Buffy and Ianto were meeting his family and Owen had stopped clanking around the medical bay long enough to come and have dinner with her in the conference room.

It was a bit of a tradition for them, to have curry when they were alone at work. Gwen didn’t like the dish and Ianto wasn’t too keen on it either so they didn’t usually get it. But when the rotation left them Riftsitting for the night – which happened a lot more often since Jack was gone and didn’t spend his nights inside the Hub anymore – they had curry.

It was their thing, something that belonged to them. It always made Tosh feel a bit fuzzy around the edges, which made her blush and feel silly because Owen probably hadn’t even noticed they had this little tradition. Owen was thick like that. Thick as a brick. 

“You know,” she said between bites, “Buffy was very sweet today. She had no idea what to do.”

He grunted, swallowed and observed, “Yeah, right. Isn’t she old enough to date on her own?”

“I think that’s the problem. She said she was too old to remember how to do these things. And you have to admit, Torchwood does not teach you how to interact with people.”

“Unless it’s to shoot them.” They shared a smile of regret and wry amusement. Their jobs were hell, but they loved them. Enough to willingly give up anything resembling a normal life. “So… she didn’t by chance say how old she is exactly?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think she knows. Why?”

He made a frustrated sound at the back of his throat and washed it away with a sip of the ever present coffee – left for them by Ianto – before remarking, “Have you ever checked her medical file? It’s twice as bad as Jack’s. When I found it, it was a stack of five or six files tied together, dating back as far as the 1890ies. At least I know why those were all together now. Same patient. The first was for a ‘Slayer’ and the only note inside was ‘refuses medical assistance’. The second said Buffy Summers, same comment and one entry about an alien induced coma. Practically useless. Keeps going like that. Changing names, never anything useful and when someone got their hands on her, the readings made no sense.”

Tosh looked thoughtful, trying to make sense of what Owen was babbling. Of course the different files would have confused him before they learned of Buffy’s and Jack’s immortality and even thought Buffy was freer with her information than her counterpart, they still knew little. And everyone in Torchwood Three knew about Buffy’s phobia of anything resembling a hospital by now. She preferred first aid in the field to a proper treatment. 

“No sense in what way?”

“Well, you’ve noticed how she never gets sick. Even when we all came down with the flu last winter, not a sneeze?”

She nodded. 

“Yeah. But that shouldn’t be possible. She has no antibodies whatsoever. Her immune system is nonexistent. Just _not there_. She should be sick to death, not laughing at us when we cough our lungs out.”

“Oh.” There was really nothing more she could say to that. She would have told him to let it go, but Owen was like her. In his own field, he was one of the best. A genius. A riddle was something to be cracked, not put aside. Owen would keep nagging their de facto boss until he had the answers he was looking for, if it was the last thing he did. 

They ate in silence for a while, Owen brooding, Tosh trying to think of a way to cheer him up. Short of tying Buffy to his dissection table for him, she couldn’t think of anything. She scraped the last of her rice off the Styrofoam plate and the doctor snatched it from her, dumping the remains of their dinner in the trash. 

He was about to walk out of the room and return to his filing when Tosh caught him by the sleeve and gave him her most brilliant smile. 

“You’ll figure it out,” she assured him with a nod.

He stopped, looking down at her strangely and then freed his hand to pat her on the shoulder. He left with only a grunt goodbye.

Toshiko sighed and went to wash her hands.

+

+

**Kneel**

+

They had a romantic dinner for two at home, because Rhys insisted that he barely saw her inside their own flat and Gwen couldn’t really argue his point. 

There was candlelight, flowers and chocolate dessert. And there was Rhys, holding her hand and looking at her a bit strangely all through dinner. But strange in a good way. And he wasn’t in a hurry to manoeuvre her into the bedroom. Which, while not unusual, was unexpected. She had been working the last five nights in a row and they had only seen each other long enough for a kiss in the doorway before he took off for work. 

“So,” Rhys finally started after the second glass of wine. “Your working hours have gotten more predictable. Still inhuman, mind you, but more predictable.”

She shrugged, nodded, thought back over the past month. He was right. “Since Buffy took over things are a bit more… organized. And we haven’t had any major catastrophes all month. We’re due for another one, actually.”

He laughed, thinking she was joking. Copper superstition. She couldn’t very well tell him that she was actually dead serious because – you see – she worked for that organization that watched and regulated the traffic of alien goods and people through a rip in time and space where someone came through trying to take over the world about once every five weeks and they all almost died. That was the nights when she didn’t come home at all between shifts because she usually had strange injuries that couldn’t be explained away by bullets or knives. But Rhys didn’t have to worry because she loved her job and wouldn’t give it up for anything. No, probably not even him. Not if he made an ultimatum out of it. Not when it came down to it. 

She ducked her head in silent shame, took his hand across the table and squeezed it lightly. “I love you,” she said.

Then her phone went off and she was up like a shot, intent on escaping her traitorous thoughts. Behind her, her boyfriend groaned, anticipating a ruined evening. She picked up her phone and checked the message. It was the standard signal for trouble and she was about to make her excuses when another message arrived.

“Under control. Stay home. Buffy,” she read out loud, making herself feel relief and joining in Rhys chuckles. 

“See,” he said, “They can save the world without you.”

She heard him stand behind her as she tucked the mobile back into the pocket of her jacket and then there was a grunt and a strange popping noise. She whirled round and found – 

\- her boyfriend kneeling on the floor, a pained look on his face, looking up at her with sheepish eyes.

“Rhys?” she asked, goggling at him.

“Ouch,” he returned, one hand clutching at his back. “Popped something again.”

“What were you going on the floor in the first place?” she demanded as she crouched next to him and started heaving him to his feet.

“Uh,” he answered, biting back on a scream as she righted him. “Dropped something.”

She led him to the sofa slowly and parked him there while she flung the cushions to the floor and then lifted his feet up. 

“You should know better,” she admonished as she pulled off his shoes. She waited for him to start defending himself but when he didn’t, she looked up at his face, a brief flash of worry shooting through her head. Unconscious maybe?

But he was – 

\- For a very long minute, Gwen stared wordlessly at the little black box he was holding in two hands, looking sheepishly and so very soulfully up at her from the sofa.

“Gwen Cooper,” she heard him say, somewhere far away. “I guess you know that I love you. Although I’m a stupid sod who can’t even get on his knees to do this properly and you’re probably going to run off to work in five seconds, and this is probably the worst… I… I want you to stay with me. Forever. So… will you marry me?”

Gwen was pretty sure she hurt Rhys as she flung herself on top of him and kissed him through her tears, kissed him like the safety of the world depended on it, but his grunt of pain was swallowed by her mouth and then there was really no reason to say anything at all anymore. 

Because she saved the world once every five weeks and sometimes only saw him in the morning when he left just after she arrived and perhaps they would not last forever, were not built for all this but God help her, she wanted it. 

She wanted him.

+

+

**Space V**

+

The first time she fell asleep after – after the falling and rising, the making and breaking of the man who called himself Captain Jack Harkness but was so, so much more – there were trees in the desert.

They came weaving through the fog, tall and green, lush and more exotic anything Earth had ever housed in all of time. They climbed along the dunes, intertwining with the desert the way Jack’s fingers had with hers before he dropped into – hopefully – dreamless sleep. 

Like a child, he had held on to her, so glad to have her, so afraid to lose her and young suddenly – this brave and bright man – so young with his thirty years compared to her century, to the Doctor’s millennium.

And overhead, the stars, shining impossibly bright in the light indigo of her sky – Hollywood night, it had been called in past lives, future lives – darkness that was not dark.

He came out of the darkness beyond her sky, using stars as stepping stones to reach her. She greeted him with a nod and nothing more and when the sand started to creep up his ankles, when the wind beat against his face and clothes, she did not sooth it like she usually did, but let it. Every bit of irritation, every discomfort, he deserved.

Deserved it for leaving a newborn god alone, blind, helpless with nothing but feeble excuses to his name. The TARDIS loved her for her endlessness and it would love Jack just the same. Jack gave him headaches? Shields could be built in a matter of days, hours. A question of concentration and will and Jack had both - if he put his mind to it – and she could have helped. They might have joked about her psychic blunders but a few decades of trial and error and another fifty years under the Doctor’s tutelage and she had surpassed the teacher. 

Her mind was a box of wonders, a steel trap, a labyrinth, a maze. Anything she wanted it to be. She could have built Jack’s shields on her own. The Doctor had no excuse for leaving him behind none but – 

\- fear. Looking at him now, hands in his pocket, half heartedly shaking his left leg to get rid of the sand and dust, she knew it was not arrogance, not anger that had made him leave but fear.

_Of what they could be._

Of what they would be. Hadn’t she watched for the past months how he clung to Rose, clung to mortal, human, normal things? What they were was not solid, was not real or linear or logical. It was a mess, a tumble of reason and un-reason, of more and less and how and why and endlessness. If they weren’t careful – so very careful – they would grow and flow, spreading across all of time and space, existing everywhere and nowhere real. 

The three of them together would be like a sun, impenetrable to anyone or anything, centre of their universe. 

So he ran.

She tried to fault him for it, she really did, but as he slipped his hand into hers she sighed and couldn’t. He wanted to be the Doctor for a while longer before he became Time. She could understand that. They were in no hurry.

He tugged on her arm, pulled her into his side and she melted against the unfamiliar frame and the familiar person as she always had. 

“Typical,” he suddenly said in his new and chipper voice, “He could have any place in the universe and he picks _trees_.”

“I think they’re pretty,” she answered as she watched them smudge the borders of her desert, of the Doctors star-spangled sky. Only a few last rags of fog lingered now.

“They’re green.”

“You got a problem with green?”

“Yes.” So decisive, so clear cut and simple. He never wavered. He never doubted. Unless it came to Buffy and Jack. Then he floundered just like anyone else. “Where is he?”

“Jack?” she was asking just to be obstinate because who else would he be asking about. This place - here, nowhere and at the centre of the universe – belonged to them only. Three sides of the triangle. 

“Yes.”

“Sleeping. Dreamless, I hope. He’s fucked up, Doc.”

He scowled at the nickname but let it go. He knew he deserved it. Good. “Well, that’s to be expected. He died.”

“It’s not the dying that fucked with him and you know it.” She turned from watching a forest grow in favour of glaring up at him. Had he grown in his new incarnation?

“What do you want from me, Slayer?” The only one left who called her that now and it was meant to be scornful, to be nasty. She didn’t feel the sting. It was just a word spoken by a man who was sometimes so desperate to just _be_ that he forgot everything else. 

Still. She sighed again, leaning her head against his shoulder for a moment. Just to rest, to rest now. Just a moment. Her cross to hang on, he was. He would not apologize, would not make amends. He would keep on running until they caught up with him and gave him no other choice. Or until his will to live deserted him and the desire to simply exist – in peace for once, peace, he remembered that, didn’t he – became too much to ignore.

“I hate you,” she told him as she stretched up to press a brief kiss to his lips. Then she stepped back with an expression of defeat and serenity and grief on her face. 

She hated him. Here, now, it was a fact. In a minute it would be ashes. It didn’t matter. Nothing ever did. Everything did. Now and here. Nowhere, if you left out the space. Same letters, same thing. It was all the same.

He smiled at her, cocked his head to one side, _what do you want me to do, you annoying bint?_

She shook her head, spun on her heel and woke. 

+

+

**Shine**

+

It was long past midnight by the time they were done cleaning up the restaurant. In the end, Buffy had let Ianto take his family home to drug them in their own beds. It was a small thing to do to make sure he would still be able to look in the mirror the next morning. 

She had helped Owen and Tosh finishing up and then followed him to his mother’s house. The house he had grown up in. The concept seemed strange to her and she made a note to try and fix that. Such normal things should not seem alien to her. They shouldn’t.

She got out of the car and checked her watch. He should almost be done by now. She would wait out here. Since it was Ianto’s car, his coat was still lying in the backseat and she pulled it on as she leaned against the hood, watching cardboard cut-out figures moving against the lights shining from the windows. Ianto, putting his mother to bed. Bringing her a glass of water. Telling her all those things he had never been brave enough to say before. Switching off the lights. Rinsing the glass in the kitchen and trying to stretch this moment, this peace, just a bit longer. 

She waited for almost twenty minutes before the front door finally opened and he stepped into the cool Welsh night, looking more lost than he had even when Jack had left. Jack. Funny, how everything always seemed to come back to Jack even – or maybe especially – when he was gone. 

Jack, Jack, Jack. For more than a century now, it had been all about Jack. She vaguely remembered laughing at Spike when he told her that he couldn’t help who he loved and that it made him a fool. Could remember her blank expression when he told her the great thing about love was not minding that you were the fool. Oh, how she wished she could go to him in the here and now, find him still alive and kicking and tell him that she understood, gods, she understood. Because she loved Jack Harkness and she followed him a bit like a lost puppy, living, some days, for the crumbs he gave her. 

She was lucky in a way. Jack did not scorn her like she had Spike for a long time. There were days when she was sure – really sure – the he loved her back. But even when she wasn’t sure, she knew he cared for her. He’d start a war, raze a few planets for her, if necessary. To keep her safe. That was enough. It had to be. 

Ianto crossed the street and walked up to her, leaning next to her against the car wordlessly. She wondered if he felt about Jack the way she did, even as she knew the answer. One look at him looking at Jack was enough to let the whole world know that Ianto felt things for the Captain that he wasn’t sure was supposed to feel. Not after Lisa, not ever again.

They stood next to each other in the dark for a while until Buffy asked, “Do you want your coat?”

“That would be impolite.”

“I’m not going to freeze to death. Literally.” She chuckled and it was a hesitant sound. Wrong time for jokes and all that.

“Thank you. For letting me take them home.”

“You’re welcome,” she returned, having long since learned to simply take a thank you in the spirit it was given. Especially from Ianto who tended to be too serious for his age.

Another few beats and then he turned so he was standing in front of her, leaving her trapped between the car and his chest. But not too close. Not crowding her, not caging her. Never that. Never Ianto. He was too hesitant sometimes, too fragile. Too broken by surviving Canary Wharf, by failing Lisa and being glad to be free of her, secretly, silently. Guilt and relief and so many ugly things. 

He gave her a moment to move away and then he leaned in and kissed her. 

She pulled back when he did and put a gentle hand on his chest to hold him away. She looked at the stars as she spoke. “I’m telling you what I told Jack: I’m not the girl you fuck to get back at him.”

“I know that.” He believed he did, she believed that. But if he really did, she wasn’t sure. How could she be?

“Do you? Because I’m cheap, Ianto. My body’s cheap. Give me a cause and I fight for you, give me a few kind words and I sleep with you. My heart’s even cheaper. But there are lines… lines that I don’t cross and I won’t be that girl.”

“I care for you,” he said into the dark. “I care for Jack. One has nothing to do with the other.”

And then he kissed her again and maybe she wasn’t that girl but it didn’t really matter because it was already too late. Jack would come back, she told herself, and this would all turn into a right big mess. 

But Ianto was warm and alive and kind and lovable and she was old and worn and kind of dead inside and understood why the Doctor had companions. 

They shone so brightly in the dark. 

+

+

**Return**

+

Jack came back four and a half months after leaving, just as he did everything. With a bang and a flirty look, a pickup line and a smile like nothing was wrong.

Like they weren’t harder, like his smile wasn’t brittle around the edges, like the world hadn’t kept turning and he hadn’t just walked out without a word to chase an impossible thing.

And he killed a blowfish.

+

+

**Wink**

+

“You left us, Jack!” Gwen screaming, finally breaking after almost an hour of restraint. It had been a long time coming and Buffy stepped back to let the scene unfold. 

Gwen pushed Jack – Jack who was back and hadn’t told them anything, Jack who pretended nothing was wrong, nothing had changed, Jack who had winked at her and smiled like he always did when they were reunited but this time it wasn’t enough because things had changed and – and he landed with his back against the wall, rattling things.

He grimaced as the whole team gathered, watching him with hawk’s eyes. The kids had grown up. 

“I know,” he said, sighing, sincere, “I’m sorry.”

Not enough, not good enough, not for Gwen, who was the great human, the worrier, still bouncing on the balls of her feet, ready to hit him if need be. “We knew nothing, Jack!”

“Where were you?” Tosh now, calming the situation, keeping them on track but with something hard in her eyes. Buffy wasn’t sure whether to smile at the confidence in the technician, or weep at her loss of innocence. 

“I found my Doctor,” Jack said and the team stirred. She had told them, over and over, that Jack was with the Doctor, that he would be back. They hadn’t believed. Or rather, hadn’t been able to believe. Life had taught them differently.

“Did he fix you?” Owen, quiet and serious for once. Grave.

“What’s to fix? You don’t mess with this level of perfection.” He looked at her as he said it, straight into her eyes and soul and all the secret things. 

She had told him. How many times had she told him there was nothing anyone could do? That the Doctor wouldn’t fix him, couldn’t fix him. Even the Time Lord was powerless in the face of destiny. Even he could not slay gods. 

He hadn’t believed her. 

She’d told him, and her words had not been enough. 

She uncrossed her arms and turned, walking away, his eyes on her back. She heard him, vaguely, saying that he came back for them, all of them. And she also heard the lilt in his voice, the hesitation that said he was talking to Ianto, not all of them. Not really. Back for Ianto. 

And then… footsteps, following her, lithe and quiet. Ianto. He caught up with her before the cog door, slung an arm around her shoulder and pressed a kiss to her temple. Public displays of affection. Oh my, she thought. But she was ridiculously grateful because here Jack was, back as always.

Back like nothing had changed and it never had before. But this time there was more. It wasn’t just them anymore. It was Gwen and Tosh and Owen and Ianto, sweet, bitter Ianto. 

A wink and a smile were not enough. Not this time.

+

+

**Flirt**

+

She kept staring at him. 

At the bar – all the way through half a dozen lewd blonde jokes, she just stared at him like he was an interesting specimen. Or a ghost. John Hart did not like being looked at like that, like he wasn’t real. Like he didn’t matter. It reminded him of ugly things. In the car, inside the secret lair of the mighty Torchwood and all the way through their little team discussion. 

She stared at him.

Finally he lost his nerve. When Jack kicked him out of the room to have a heart to heart with Cute With Gap and sent Buffy – what kind of name was that for a member of a secret alien fighting organization – to watch him, he acted.

As soon as they were out of sight he slipped around and in front of her, bullying her against the nearest wall with his own body. She went without hesitation – like she’d waited for this, had predicted his move, had somehow expected him to do this, to crowd her and invade her and – leaning against the wall with an insolent slouch, looking up at him with wide, green eyes. 

Could have made a fortune as a whore, with those soulful eyes and the pout. 

“So honey,” he drawled, one hand on either side of her face, “I know I’m charming but all that staring’s a bit too much.”

“Is it?” Curious and flat and it occurred to him that it was the first time he had heard her speak. All through the meeting she had only communicated with Jack through a few looks and nods. Not a word. Silent as the grave. Her voice fit her frame, fit her looks. But not the birdlike stare that went right through him.

“Yes. So what gives?”

She raised a hand, one finger extended, tracing his cheekbone from temple to nose, around his lips, down to his chin and up his jaw line. A tiny girl with a tiny finger tracing the lines of his face. It scared him. The way she _looked_.

“You remind me of a man I knew. Long time ago. You look exactly like him.”

Tongue behind his teeth, cheeks hollowed he gave her his best sex smile and asked, “Did you – “ and then he thrust his hips forward into hers, actions speaking louder than words. 

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and let her head fall against the walls. “Oh yes.”

“Well, darling, if you want to relive a few memories…”

Instead of reacting in any way she opened her eyes again and said, “He was a lot like you, you know? Always trying to get a rise out of people. Lying, cheating, drinking. Killing.”

First that guy and then Jack? He was starting to see a pattern. The little bird liked her boys bad and mad. He made a note to hack into the old Time Agency files, see what he could dig up about her. There might be fun to be had. Never mind the stories still floating around the ruins of the Agency about how mad and bad she was herself.

“Then I don’t see a problem with you and me.”

“I do.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” she told him and slipped under his arm, past his defences, slamming him face first into the wall she had just been leaning against. Then she stood on tip toe and whispered into his ear, “He sacrificed himself to save a world. Because he loved me.”

She let him go abruptly and spun to walk away. She had already reached the end of the hall when he got his bearings and called after her, “No reason to deny yourself perfectly good sex.”

She stopped, turned and looked at him again with the bird stare and this time he knew that he was nothing to her but a ghost. A ghost of her past. It was funny. Normally he actually had to work for his face to haunt people. 

“Have you ever loved anyone enough to just lie next to them, all night?”

Involuntarily John’s gaze was drawn to the door of the conference room behind which Jack was still talking to his groupie. He tore his eyes away as soon as he realized what he was doing but it was too late. She was smiling a skewed little smile of understanding, indulgence, grief and memories.

“Exactly,” she said.

+

+

**Speak**

+

Jack couldn’t believe he was doing this. Well, actually he could. It was just… when was the last time he had asked anyone out on a date? And Ianto was not making it easy. He wasn’t even looking at him, hadn’t looked at Jack since he had walked out after Buffy. 

Jack remembered the moment, the feeling he got when his young lover wrapped his arm around his old one and walked out with her, the feeling of having the floor pulled out from under him. Things had _changed_. 

Somehow, he hadn’t expected them to.

“So,” he asked before leaving the room – after getting kicked out, no less – “Was that a yes?”

The other man looked up from his search distractedly, absentmindedly and opened his mouth, about to answer, when he suddenly thought better of it. That lovely mouth snapped shut as he spun to face the Captain fully and say, “On one condition, Sir.”

Yep, the bratty part of Jack’s mind chirped, things definitely changed. Where had the man gone that was so desperate for touch that he took it from the man who killed his lover? The twenty-five-year-old wracked by guilt and grief? The tentative new man flirting with shy smiles and stop watches? 

This new Ianto, he was a scary thing, standing there in his suit, comfortable with the gun tucked in his pants, comfortable making demands of his boss. Comfortable in his own skin. He was an equal.

And Jack, Jack who had gone and touched infinity again and returned because this - this rainy town, had somehow become home - Jack knew that there was nothing he could to but go with the flow. 

He had left. Whatever right he’d had to the people he cared about, it was long gone now. 

“What condition?”

“Buffy, Sir.”

He blinked, confused. Buffy? They had talked about her months ago, solved the question of who was with whom. Unless…. Ianto and Buffy? Jack spent a moment letting himself be mentally derailed by the idea of those beautiful, beautiful people together before he pulled the emergency brake and got back on track. This was important! This was… this was his life. The one he was not going to abandon again to chase after wild hopes. 

“You are going to apologize to her.”

“What? Why? What did I do?”

The eyebrow let him now that he had really, really stepped in it now.

“I don’t know, Sir. What did you do? Or didn’t you do anything?”

In Ianto-speak that meant Jack had failed to do something that should have been obvious, while at the same time doing something else he should not have done. He spent a moment worrying over the fact that he seemed to speak perfect Ianto although that had not been planned. Then he shrugged, knowing it was going to make things worse but unable to do anything before he knew what he had done wrong. Or not done. 

“You take her for granted, Sir.”

“I do?” He did? He didn’t, did he? Buffy knew what she meant to him, how important she was. He had told her that he loved her only a few weeks before he had left, while they had been about to be blown up. She’d saved the day and he had…oh. But before that, after the last averted apocalypse. He had picked her up, spun her around and told her that he loved her. Her and the rest of the team. But before that. Before she had put up the sex embargo, he’d told her… while they’d been in bed together. When was the last time he had simply told her that he loved her without there being a catastrophe, sex or alcohol? He tried to remember but couldn’t. 

Could it be that in all the years since they had met while running from a child wearing a gas mask, he had not told her once? Not a single time in all those sleepless nights they had spent dreaming of the lives they would never have, sharing thoughts of children, of settling down and growing old – growing old instead of staying the same, endlessly the same, timeless and ageless, but only in body and not in mind because oh, inside, inside they were so much older than they could bear and without her there to _tell_ , he would have never picked up the pieces, would still be a brittle thing with loose parts of his soul rattling around his insides, hollow, broken thing with an endless existence and nothing to live for. 

And he had never told her he loved her and meant it. 

She didn’t know. 

Shit.

Didn’t know and somehow could still stand to look at him after all these years.

His mouth snapped shut with all the denials and arguments still inside and he nodded curtly. 

“Thank you,” he said, before spinning on his heel and walking out.

Ianto did not call after him.

+

+

**Space VI**

+

Time rewound itself after they threw the bomb into the Rift and while the others were still grumbling about where to go and what to do now that they had to avoid themselves, Buffy quickly waved goodbye and took off. 

She found him just where Jack had said he would be, sitting cross-legged on the ground next to the TARDIS, smiling at her like he had expected her. He probably had. She sat down next to him, bumping shoulders in a silent hello and they sat for a while, watching the early evening in Cardiff pass them by. 

“You could have said hello.”

“Yeah…probably.”

“But you’re scared shitless of being in the same room as me _and_ Jack, aren’t you?”

He looked at her, those new and fancy eyebrows raised impossibly high and glibly said, “Like one of you isn’t enough already.”

She sighed and let her head fall back to lean against the beloved blue box behind her. He was lying and they both knew it. “One day we will have to come together. All three of us. You can’t avoid us forever.”

“I can try.”

It wouldn’t work. They both knew that, too. He could avoid them for centuries, could turn tail and run away when he saw them coming. He could leave them, abandon them, ignore them. But he could not escape what was to come. One day, here, now or in a million years they would come together as they were meant to, three parts of the same thing, and they would become the inevitable, even if neither knew what that was quite yet. 

“The running thing? I tried that. Never works out. How long are you going to run? End of the universe?”

“Actually, I considered the end of me to be far enough. Don‘t you think so? Very dramatic sort of thing to say, ‘the end of me’, but I like it.”

She rolled her head to look at him, the innocentangry look on his face – the frustration he hid so badly under all his ranting and bouncing about - and opened her mouth briefly before shutting it again. There was no use saying out loud what he knew and refused to voice. The last of the Time Lords was no more mortal than she was. The Time Vortex he had taken into himself to save Rose, the messed up regeneration. Another piece fallen into place as the stars had stretched over the desert and the forest with their blinding brilliance. 

She shook her head and blindly reached for his hand – the part of him that he always gave willingly, his hand, to pull you, to carry you, to hold you, to keep you – and said, “We create ourselves. We may scatter, across time and space but we lead ourselves where we need to be. All that is and all that was. All that will be. All that lives and all that dies. Inevitable, Doctor. Don’t you get tired of fighting?”

He chuckled and squeezed her hand tightly. More than human tight, tight with memory and fear and a hint of… awe? Wonder? Terror? What was it that he felt? What was it that he heard in her words that made him seem more human than he ever had in the years she’d known him? “You don’t seem very tired either. I felt the mess you made of time just now, you. Always in trouble, you and dear Jack. Can’t leave you alone for longer than five minutes or it’s planets blowing up all around.”

“Not my fault,” she defended, tracking a random passer by until the man disappeared from sight. “Old friend of Jack’s came through the Rift. Tried to kill us all, almost got blown up, said something that caused Jack to quietly freak out and then left again. I also think he snogged at least half the team sometime during the night.”

“Sounds like someone Jack would be friends with.”

“Mhm. What happened while you were gone? He’s different.” Change of subject with a snap of fingers. Eternity in random bits and pieces. Sometimes even the Doctor with his scary big brain had trouble keeping up with her.

“He doesn’t want to die anymore.” Drawled, slow. Precise for once, without grand gestures and words. Just a fact. A truth. A gift.

She jerked around, surprised, glancing at him with wide eyed disbelief. The Time Lord quirked a smile and nodded in affirmation. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. 

“Do you?”

Her eyes opened again as she looked at him quizzically. “Do what?”

“Want to die.”

Buffy shrugged, nodded, shrugged again. “I do, sometimes. All the fighting and struggling and watching people die. I hold their hands when they go and I feed on their deaths. It makes me sick. But then I touch Jack and I feel them _living_ instead of dying and that’s…”

“Fantastic?”

She laughed. “Yes. Fantastic.”

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and for a while they just sat there, unmoving. Pillars in time and space. Fixed points. North stars of all of creation. Buffy wondered what the others were doing but not enough to find out. They were probably getting drunk and celebrating the return of their esteemed leader. 

“Can you promise me something?” she asked out of the blue.

He looked at her sideways, eyebrows raised and carefully said, “Promise what?”

“Promise me that you won’t run for too long. Because I think that… you and me and Jack, we’re going to be _fantastic_ , too. And I don’t want to miss out on that.”

“We’ll stop being ourselves.”

“You don’t know that. We might just become more. We might not change at all. We don’t know what will happen. And anyway, can you imagine someone with your brains, Jack’s charm and my right hook? We’d bag the universe like this.” She snapped her fingers and grinned childishly at him.

He laughed and shook his head, ruffling her hair. “You’re impossible.”

“I know.”

“Yes. Yes, I promise that I won’t run too long. Just a bit more. World might still need its Doctor, don’t you think?”

It was her turn to laugh now as she snuggled deeper into his side, relaxing. She was going to hold him to that promise. One day, when Jack had sexed all the universe’s sentient species, when the Doctor had saved enough worlds to make up for his own dead planet, when Buffy had found all that she was looking for, they would find each other. 

And they would become something glorious. Life, Death and Time. The fabric of the universe.

+

+

**Lose**

+

Jack and Ianto showed up just as the Doctor was about to try and wiggle away from her so he could get back to his beloved stars. They appeared out of the dark and settled in a circle of light, waiting, watching. Jack looked like he wanted to squirm but wouldn’t allow himself to and Ianto looked very serious. Buffy expected this to be where they told her how things were going to be from now on. 

She kissed the Doctor goodbye just because she could and it would make not one but three men study their shoes, and let him go. Wind and whirring sound, blinking light and fading box and then the Time Lord was gone like he’d never been there. All he left behind was his promise.

And Jack.

She walked up to the boys, expecting them to say something but Jack just smiled and put an arm around her waist while Ianto spun on his heel and led the way. It wasn’t far to his flat, Buffy knew, and guessed that was where they were going. 

She was right. The youngest of the three unlocked the door and waved them inside, smiling at Buffy and giving the Captain a stern look. 

“Coffee?” he asked and they both nodded automatically, long since trained to Ianto’s offer like dogs to the bell.

Ianto brought them both a cup of steaming hot black magic and gave Jack yet another look before bending down and kissing Buffy. Not staking a claim, not making a statement. Not even a goodbye. He just kissed her the way he had kissed her against his car in front of his mother’s house. Like she mattered. Like she was precious. It was something she had not felt in a long time.

Jack almost choked on his coffee and coughed badly. He hadn’t expected that, it seemed. _But Jack,_ Buffy thought, _the world moves without you, even if it hurts._ Then Ianto straightened, smiled and said, “I’ll take a shower.”

And he walked out of the room, leaving Buffy and Jack and an elephant behind. Several elephants, actually, but Buffy only knew the name of one. Ianto. They were silent for a long time, long enough actually, to hear the shower turn on and run for a while. 

Then the Captain observed, “You and Ianto, huh?”

“Yes.” It seemed to be the night for hard conversations. 

“Are you that girl for him?” he asked softly, not accusingly. Just curious. That conversation from after Brecon Beacons still echoed in his head. Most of their conversations did, right now.

She took a sip of her coffee and answered, “No. I’m Buffy. And I think I might love him.”

He lay his head against the sofa he was sitting on and laughed, a single sharp bark of amusement. “You talk about it so easily.”

“Talk about what?”

“Love. You just say the words. Like it doesn’t matter.”

Buffy shrugged but frowned in confusion at the same time. “It doesn’t matter. If I love someone, I love them. Words are just words, Jack.”

He sat up straight, eyes fixed on her with a new intensity suddenly as he scooted forward in his seat. “But you understand why I can’t say them, don’t you?”

Head cocked slightly to one side, she waited. He had that glow in his eyes, desperate intensity. He would keep talking until he was empty. “They all leave. They die. And I’m all that’s left again. If I don’t say it, if I don’t say the words out loud, they’re not real. And I don’t have to grieve.”

_But you still do_. She didn’t say it. It was in her eyes. That was enough.

“But I messed up, didn’t I? They’re all so bright and wonderful and beautiful and it scares me. But I should have told you a million times.” He took a deep breath, wavered and then kept marching on, “You’re always there. You never leave, you never die. You’re… amazing. And I…,“ choking on the words, even now. A hundred and fifty years of conditioning telling him not to say them because they would ruin everything and break his heart yet again. He wasn’t like her. He couldn’t just keep moving, endlessly. He could have sex, yes, but Buffy _loved_.

She loved him. And that was why he had to say it. Why she had to know. Not so he could get a date with Ianto, not so he could have sex, not for any other reason than that she had to know that he did not take her for granted. She had to know that she humbled him, amazed him, broke him sometimes and fixed him always. 

“I love you,” he said before he could lose his courage, before his throat could close up and he was left wordless again. 

She didn’t kiss him, didn’t fling herself at him, didn’t cry or crow or do anything else. She just sat there, unblinkingly, for a long minute. And then the words sunk in and the smile rose on her face like a new born sun and it was bright, so bright, that he thought it might burn him.

Ianto had entered the room sometime during the conversation, still dripping from the shower, dressed in track pants and a t-shirt. He stood behind Buffy, watching the two of them, not intruding. _Witnessing_. 

Jack finally put down his cup and reached across the coffee table to grab the blonde by the hand and pull her over to his sofa. She came willingly, curling into him like she was made for it.

“Thank you,” she said, but her eyes were closed so it was anyone’s guess which one of the men she was talking to. 

Ianto just smiled down at the two strange, immortal creatures sitting in his living room and waited until Jack caught his glance. 

Gently he admonished, “We may be mortal, Captain, but we do love you and if you give us something of yourself in return, you can have all we are, for as long as we last. Isn’t that better than always keeping yourself aloof?”

Jack – being Jack – did not answer. At least not verbally. Instead he waved his archivist around until the younger man stood in front of him. Then he grabbed him by the t-shirt, pulled him down and kissed him with the fervour of a drowning man.

Inches from their kiss, Buffy hummed happily. 

+

+

**Archive**

+

There were things about Buffy and Jack that Ianto would never know. After more than a year, he was very aware of that. Even if they answered all his questions, told him all their stories, there would still be things he did not know. Could not know.

Not while he was a man in his mid-twenties and they weighed half a millennium, together. But sometimes words were superfluous and he could read all he needed to know from the look on their faces, the lines of their hands, the rigidity of their backs. Sometimes he could see all he ever wanted to know – more even, so much more – in their eyes, distant and cold.

And there were things he knew that no-one else did. Things he noticed but did not speak about, because they were so precious and being allowed to see them, to know them, was a gift. 

There was the way Jack sometimes kissed with his eyes open, like he needed reassurance. The way he touched everyone on the team first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. To make sure they were still there, maybe. 

The glassy, remote look of almost pleasure but more pain Buffy got when something or someone died. The way Jack’s kisses healed – because he remembered, oh yes, he did, remembered being flung into the pool by Lisa and waking up with the Captain’s tongue down his throat, not a broken bone in his body. The way there was a spark sometimes, when they touched – literally. A spark of white hot fire that they never seemed to notice. 

There were the keys they both wore around their necks. Jack’s on a leather cord softened by age and Buffy’s on a silver necklace that was much sturdier than it looked. Ianto suspected alien metal and got spellbound by the way it caught the light when she arched above him in the moon light. They were simple door keys, metal, identical. He only found out about the last when they both lay curled around him the night Jack returned to them. They were both asleep – a rare thing, a gift of trust in itself – and he had time to look from one to the other until he was sure they were identical.

And the scars. Jack’s were few but deep. Gun shot wounds, laser burns. The scars of war. He never mentioned them and no-one ever asked about them. Buffy’s were almost invisible but in many ways worse than Jack’s because there seemed to be a million. Impossible to see for the casual eye, almost not there in daylight. But the moon made them silvery bright and they stood out, a network of scars that covered her whole body, her arms and legs, her neck and torso, her back and chest. 

Everywhere. 

And every one of them had once been a wound. A wound received before she had become what she was today. The Buffy and Jack Ianto knew, the ones who could not die, they did not scar either. So those wounds had once been inflicted on a mortal girl, a mortal body. It made a shudder run down his spine. 

Of course there were other things, too, smaller things. The remote looks they got when someone mentioned certain things or places. The way they sometimes flinched at harmless stories, the way their eyes met across a room. 

They carried many secrets.

Some of them, Ianto found out slowly, piece by piece. And he collected them as archivists did, filed and labelled them and put them away in the cellars where they would be safe. 

He protected them.

He kept them. 

That was his job.

And when Buffy stirred next to him and woke with a languid stretch, when Jack reacted to the motion of the bed and cracked open one eye, when he leaned over Ianto and kissed him like he was air, when Buffy’s hand trailed along his ribs and her chuckle caught in his ear, Ianto thought that maybe the two of them knew what he did.

Maybe they knew of all the pieces of them he kept and were okay with that. He liked to imagine that he was their secret keeper by design instead of accident.

And then Buffy found that spot behind his ear and breathed on it and he did not imagine anything at all anymore. 

+

+

**Help**

+

When she was seven years old, Toshiko Sato was determined to be a genius by several doctors and psychologists. Her parents sent her to a new school, with new children, new teachers. New ways of learning that were meant to advance her, not slow her down. 

She loved the classes, loved that the teachers answered her honestly and seriously when she asked them questions about things she wasn’t even supposed to be able to pronounce. She loved that no-one told her that she should stop reading and go play, that no-one tried to forbid her from doing something because she was too young, too small. 

What she didn’t love were the other children. They were all about learning, about being better, being smarter. Toshiko wanted all that, too, but she was kind about it. She didn’t turn her back on her old friends just because they couldn’t multiply triple digits in their head at the age of four. She didn’t bully, wasn’t mean to others. She didn’t carry her IQ in front of her like a banner that everyone was meant to bow to.

She partnered with the slowest kid in class – still a hundred times smarter than anyone else in their age group, but not good enough for a bunch of future rocket scientists – and she helped with homework when you asked her nicely. 

She was a good child. Kind. Polite. Gentle. 

And then something went wrong. 

It must have. Somewhere between being seven and now, something had gone wrong and she had become someone else. Maybe she had lost herself in all the science. Maybe she had forgotten how to be gentle Toshiko. Maybe it had happened when she had gotten the note telling her they had her mother and she better do as they said. Maybe it had happened in solitary confinement in a dank, dark UNIT cell. 

But she suspected that hadn’t been when at all. She suspected that the cell had made her weaker, softer still. No, it hadn’t been UNIT that had made her as she was today. It had been Jack. Jack who had come and offered her salvation and a gun and a cause. 

Five years later she had sent a twenty-year-old boy to his death, using the words he had given her in trust as weapons. 

_My brave, handsome hero._

He’d do anything for her if she used those words, he’d said. And she’d kissed him and loved him and sent him away. And then she had followed him and spoken those words to seal his fate, to make him write his own death sentence. 

_My brave, handsome hero. Use the key, Tommy._

He’d been shell shocked. A boy that had seen too much war, too much death, too much of life. He had deserved better. But instead of helping him, instead of becoming his partner and carrying him for a while, she had sent him away. To his doom. 

And the worst part was knowing that she would do it again. Because someone had to. The world needed to be safe. It needed to be right, time had to be linear and Tommy had to be in 1918, dead. 

That was the cause Jack had given her when he had led her out of that cell. That was her reason.

“It had to happen that way,” Buffy’s words were whipped away by the wind of the Bay almost before she heard them but she did. 

“I know,” she answered without looking at the other woman. “That’s the problem.”

And she did. Duty. Sacrifice. War. That was the new Toshiko Sato. Not the gentle genius child, but the soldier. 

And soldiers didn’t get happy endings.

_Use the key, Tommy._

+

+

**Break**

+

“So you do have a heart,” Gwen said as soon as the others had left the room. Jack whipped his head around to look at her and his eyes were cold. 

But Rhys didn’t see that because he was focused on the youngest member of the team, slip of a girl really. Buffy. That was her name. She had watched the entire fight between Rhys and Gwen play out, had watched the entire team and not said a single word meanwhile, refusing to give an opinion. 

But now, almost out the door, she stopped. She stopped and turned to Gwen and there was murder in her eyes. 

“A heart?” she asked, very calmly. Very evenly. Out in the hall, the rest of the team stopped in their tracks and turned to watch whatever was coming. 

Gwen, angry and worried and scared as she was missed, the signs and snapped, “Yes, a heart! You’re sending Rhys in there, for God’s sake! Both of you, you don’t give a shit, do you?!”

“Buffy,” Jack tried to caution - to reason maybe - but she shook her head and ignored him. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and did nothing. 

“You think we don’t know what we’re sending him into?”

Gwen opened her mouth to answer but Buffy didn’t let her. “Because we do. We really do. Do you have any idea how tiny you are? How _fragile_ and _mortal_?! All it takes is a bit of metal, a flick of the wrist and you just _break_. All of you!

“If I could, if Jack could, we’d lock you up and keep you safe. We’d keep you alive. But we can’t. Because you’re stubborn and brave and stupid and so _fucking_ human. I have a heart, Gwen Cooper, and it breaks every time I know any of you are out there, doing dangerous things, but I can’t stop you, can I? I don’t have the right to. Neither of us do.

“So we take your bullets for you and we protect you and we let you fight your own fight because we have no right to hold you back. Any of you. If Rhys wants to fight then let him, for fuck’s sake!”

“But he can’t even defend himself!”

Screaming now, both of them. “And you think you can?! You think you could stop me if I wanted you dead? You all _break_ , Gwen. And we’ve got to live with that. So spare me the fucking speech. I have a fucking heart and gods know, I wish I didn’t!”

She spun and ran from the room – fleeing, actually – past the others standing in the hall, looking shell shocked and frozen, around a corner and out of sight. 

It was Ianto who recovered first, who stepped back into the room and laid a hand on the Captain’s shoulder from behind. “Jack?”

Jack didn’t react, his eyes closed, face blank. “Was she telling the truth?”

“Yes. I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for a while now, actually. Sorry you had to watch it.”

Gwen, with tears in her eyes, finally gathered herself enough to bark, “Sorry? You’re sorry? What was that all about, Jack?”

His eyes opened, fixed on her with a bird like remoteness. “You heard her. Be ready to go in an hour. I’ll find her.”

And then he was gone, too, and Toshiko and Owen re-entered the room. The silence was awkward.

“Did you know that’s how they feel?” Toshiko asked the room at large after a minute.

Everyone except Ianto shook their heads. And then everyone turned to look at him curiously. He shrugged. “They can’t die. We can. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.”

Another silence and Rhys wondered just what the other man meant by ‘can’t die’. Then he remembered Jack’s period dress and the way everyone seemed to treat Buffy like she was a lot more than just a twenty-year-old and he figured he didn’t want to know. Aliens and his fiancée who fought them were freaky enough without adding immortals to the mix, thanks a lot. He suddenly wished for a quiet pint at the pub very hard. 

“Well,” Owen summed up once the silence got strained, “Shit.”

“You know,” Gwen offered after wiping her eyes on her sleeves, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard Buffy yell before.”

There was some general chuckling at that until Toshiko demanded to know, “What do we do now?”

“Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?” Ianto said, standing up straighter.

“Oh yeah?” Owen.

“Yes. We don’t die.” 

+

Later, much later, after the alien was burned to a crisp, after Retcon had been thrown around like confetti and everyone was mostly patched up and in one piece, Buffy found Ianto in the kitchen, preparing Myfanwy’s dinner.

She leaned against the nearest counter and said conversationally, “Hospital called. One of the guys has a strange mark on his forehead.”

“Oh?”

“Yep. Sounds like someone stun-gunned him to the head.”

“Interesting,” Ianto admitted, but kept chopping up raw meat into pieces that he would later throw up for the dinosaur to catch out of the air. It was a game of sorts.

“You could have killed the guy, Ianto. Zapping his head? What were you thinking?” Not scolding, not angry. Merely curious. Sometimes, he thought to himself, Buffy’s reactions were completely off. The scary part was that he rarely noticed anymore. 

He finished the meat, smacked the last handful into the plastic container he used to store it and washed his hands calmly before turning and looking her in the eye. It was funny how he had to look down to actually do that. She seemed so much taller than life, normally.

“I was not dying.” 

It sounded callous even to his own ears, but she seemed to understand. He was being not fragile, not breakable. He was staying alive. He wouldn’t leave her alone. Not if he could help it.

Some of the sullen, cold look she’d worn since Jack had gone after her thawed and she smiled at him. It was an honest, bright smile.

“Thank you,” she said. And she meant it.

+

+

**Time V**

+

When Jack found himself in the middle of a giant forest in a million shades of green, he was surprised. After a moment the surprise faded into something slower, gentler. This place was… familiar.

It felt warm under his body, soft and welcoming. It felt like home. Only that he had no home anymore and anything close to one had long since been destroyed. He was a man from nowhere, a traveller. He should not even remember what home felt like. 

Still, this was it. This place, he was sure about that, absolutely sure, belonged to him. It was his forest. Green. There had been no green on Boeshane Peninsula. Only blue and yellow, ocean and sand. Jack loved green. Maybe that was why he loved Buffy’s eyes.

Buffy. The last memory he had was of her curling into his side, still grumpy about the way he had crashed her party and ruined her life, but forgiving, too, as always. Maybe she forgave him too much. But he remembered that, and falling asleep. 

Ah, he was dreaming then. 

He stood slowly, surveying his surroundings, and set off. He had no idea where he was going, but it seemed like a good direction. After an hour or a thousand, he glimpsed something bright through the trees. Since one direction was any direction, he walked toward it and after another eternity of wandering, he reached the tree line. 

Beyond: Desert. 

Buffy was sitting cross legged on top of the highest dune in sight – something Jack knew to be impossible because once you reached the top of a dune you _always_ came down, sliding on a board of sand and dust – elbows resting on her knees, talking to a sand tornado no higher than his knees.

He stepped out of the trees and into the sand and immediately he felt less welcome. Less home. More like an intruder. The tornado grew as if in surprise and Buffy looked at him indulgently. “Took you long enough. I thought you weren’t ever going to come out of that jungle.”

He shrugged, not about to apologize to a figment of his imagination and made his way up the dune, which, predictably, didn’t carry him the way it carried Buffy. He slid down on his butt and she followed with a giggle, landing next to him.

“How’d you like the trees?”

“Love them,” he told her easily. “They’re mine, aren’t they?”

She nodded, patted the tornado and then shooed it away. “Yep. Been there since… the Gaming Station. You just never took the time to drop by.”

“What’s this place then?” he asked, waving one arm to encompass the desert.

“What’s it like?”

“Different from the trees, that much is for sure.”

“Well, the trees are yours. This place isn’t.”

“It feels like…,” - hot and bright, burning, searing, hard, merciless, endless – “It feels like death.” He felt uneasy suddenly, like a shadow had fallen.

If he let it, if he let go, the desert would kill him, would eat him up, make him disappear. The woman would come from the rocks and take his life with her knife of bone and where the hell was that coming from? What woman? He looked sideways at the blonde sitting next to him – he’d never noticed how much she looked like the desert, all shades of yellow and brown and gold– and he suddenly knew that he was thinking her thoughts and not his own. He jerked, as if to move away from her, and his thoughts were his own again.

She laughed and flung herself backwards, making a snow angel. Or was that a sand angel? “That’s because it is. Welcome to my world.”

“I’m not really dreaming you, am I?”

She giggled again and tugged on the back of his shirt to get him to lie down, too. He hesitated, feeling the sand against his skin, sharper than it should be. The desert didn’t like him. No, not that. It didn’t not like him as much as it was simply not compatible with him. He was the trees, not the sand. 

“Nope. I’m real.”

She was real and this was her desert and it was death and… and Jack was lost. “Why death?”

Why live in a land of death and no mercy? Why not have trees, like he did? Trees were gentle things, slow and careful. Steady. Alive. They breathed and fed and bathed in the sunlight. 

“It’s what I am. Just like you’re the trees. Our worlds reflect what we are.”

“What am I then?”

“Life.” Of course.

“And that? Who do the stars belong to?” he asked, pointing to the right and up, where the universe sprawled, too low on the horizon to be real, too close to be anything but magical. Darkness and stars and suns and moons, the universe close enough to touch, if he only reached out a single hand.

“The Doctor, of course.” Doctor was what he understood, but the word she used was different altogether, more, bigger. Simpler. 

Time. She said Time. 

But Jack didn’t take the time to analyze that, already moving toward the stars, intent on finding the Time Lord. Buffy’s hand on his wrist stopped him. “It’s no use, Jack. He left a few minutes before you came and it was a version of him that didn’t coincide with you anyway. There’d be really no use in yelling at him. At all.”

“Oh.” And he found himself sitting back down, relaxing in that strangely, paradoxically logical way of dreams. No rage, no confusion. Only facts. He had a world of trees that was his because he was Life and the desert was Death was Buffy and the Doctor spanned the skies above and around them both, Time in all its endless glory. 

“Three sides of the triangle,” he found himself saying, his voice hijacked by something beyond his understanding.

Buffy clapped her hands and beamed at him. “Exactly. Finally you get it.”

But he didn’t get it at all. 

“What are we, Buffy?”

Beyond the timeless, ageless, undying, broken things they were in their physical forms, beyond strange dreams and funny powers, beyond this new trick he did where he touched a person and could tell how much life was left in them, how many years. Beyond all that, what were they?

She looked at him with eyes that were not green anymore suddenly, but black. Black as the shadow that moved behind her, slipping through the rocks, black as the face that stared at him from behind her shoulder, painted and savage.

She looked at him and said, “We are gods, Jack.”

He woke hanging over the side of the bed, retching up his dinner.

+

+

**Remember**

+

It was a quiet day at the Hub and that meant something. Usually trouble. They hadn’t had a single alarm in thirty seven hours and they were not in a down swing. Either something big and monstrous was using Rift energy for its own nefarious purposes and intending to take over the world, or some deity had decided to, for once, smile down on Torchwood Three. 

Knowing their track record, the team believed in the former and bounced around the Hub, waiting for action. What they got was a bit… different.

“What is Buffy doing downtown? Didn’t she just go out to get us kebab?” Tosh picked up her glasses and put them on, leaning closer to the screen. To be sure she ran a recognition matrix over the CCTV footage and yes, “That’s definitely Buffy. Who are the people with her?”

Owen, Gwen and Ianto, glad for the distraction, all drifted toward her station and looked over her shoulder. It was Buffy. 

Buffy, wearing leather pants. With twenty pounds less than she’d had when she’d walked out the room half an hour earlier. And shorter hair. She was trailing after an elderly man in a tweed suit and a young woman with vibrantly red hair. They were both chattering away happily, effectively ignoring the blonde woman walking half a step behind and a bit to the side. 

She looked around disinterestedly, taking in the sights like she didn’t know every nook and cranny of the city as well as her own bed. Someone jostled her suddenly and she almost jumped out of her skin. 

The team watched, paralyzed. What the hell was going on? When had Buffy met those people, become that person? The Buffy they knew didn’t jump out of her skin, didn’t trail after people like a trained dog. She didn’t look around her sightlessly, losing her hold on her surroundings enough to be surprised by a simple passer by. 

She just didn’t.

“Captain,” Owen called after a minute of silent vigil around the computer. 

Jack stuck his head out the door to his office and asked, “What did you blow up now, Owen?”

The doctor ignored the jibe – dead give away that he was being serious – and said, “Better take a look at this.”

Jack came and did take a look, only to immediately flip open his mobile phone and order, “Back to the Hub, now.”

He hung up before anyone could say a word and pulled up a chair to watch the camera jumping footage of the not-Buffy, completely unperturbed by what he was seeing. The rest of the team was having flashbacks to the last time they had met a Buffy that was not Buffy, but an incorporeal harbinger of doom that had gotten them to kill Jack, open the Rift and release a world eating monster on Cardiff, which had in turn, killed Jack again. It didn’t help their equilibrium that the boss refused to tell them what was going on. 

Ten minutes after the call to retreat, the cog door rolled open and revealed – Buffy. Wearing a smart black skirt, high heels and a dress shirt that belonged to Ianto, with long hair and a sharpness in her eyes that the other Buffy lacked completely. 

She dumped two bags filled with lunch on Gwen’s desk in passing and asked, “What did Owen blow up now?”

Owen scowled, grunted and pointed at the screen while Jack supplied, “You’re crossing your own timeline.”

Buffy followed Owen’s outstretched finger to the screen that still showed an image of her walking listlessly through downtown Cardiff and groaned. 

“Buffy,” Gwen finally asked, “Jack? What’s going on?”

“That,” the blonde tapped the screen, “Is me. A…. twenty-six-year-old me. The joys of time travel.”

“But how can you be there?” Tosh asked, still confused, “And who’re these people?”

Jack spun his chair around to look at his second in command curiously, awaiting an answer as much as the others. They had never talked much about their origins but now that the matter was at hand…

Buffy sighed, shrugged and offered, “Did I mention that I was born around here? This is my linear, pre-time-travelling self.”

It was Ianto who did the math fastest and observed, “That means you were born in eighty-one. You’re only two years older than me, in linear time.”

“And younger than the rest of us,” Owen piped in, grinning widely.

“In linear time. Which I left behind long ago. So whatever little girl joke you were going to make, save it.” 

Tosh derailed the brewing argument by waving a hand in the air and asking, “But what’s wrong with you?” She looked worried for the Buffy on screen.

Their Buffy shrugged but made no attempt to answer. The Captain waved away the question and demanded instead, “I’m more interested in knowing what you’re – she’s - doing here in the first place. You could have warned us.”

“I actually forgot that I ever was in Cardiff before. Willow – that’s the red head – and Giles were picking up some sort of relic or something and they made me tag along. As a bodyguard, if you will. From what I remember now, it was boring. It looks boring.”

“It looks like you hate it,” Gwen observed, eyes fixed on the camera footage, still.

The blonde chuckled and shrugged. “I did. I was six years immortal, my friends betrayed me and then acted like nothing happened, treating me like an errant child. My purpose was gone, my home was gone, the man I loved was gone and all I really wanted to do was die. It sucked.”

“Wow. Weren’t you a ray of sunshine,” Owen said, looking uncomfortable and sullen as he always did when the conversation turned personal.

Another shrug. “In a couple of years I’ll finally get fed up enough with being taken for granted to walk away. I’ll travel the world for… a decade or so. I’ll learn to see the beauty in things. Remember how to be alive. Then the Time Agency is going to pick me up and the rest is history.”

Ianto’s face was smooth as he spoke, but the worry evident in his voice. “You seem very blasé about this.”

“Blasé? Maybe. I forgot to look at the stars.” She stood on tiptoe and pressed a rare public kiss against Ianto’s unresisting lips, grinning widely. “Now I remember.”

+

+

**Grieve**

+

An hour later most of Torchwood Three had dug into lunch and found drinks and were sitting around Tosh’s workstation, ‘Buffy watching’. They were tracking the progress of the linear Buffy through the city, seemingly spellbound by watching her do nothing but walk, look and occasionally glare at someone or something.

Non-linear Buffy had started checking up on security. She had run a complete check of all systems, walked the perimeter and was now sorting through their at-the-ready weapon’s cache, to make sure everything worked. It was a habit picked up in too many battles, this checking and rechecking. It calmed her nerves, gave her hands something to do that was productive and soothing. It made it so she didn’t have to climb the walls.

Ianto had called her attitude blasé, but that wasn’t it really. She had learned, over the years before the Agency picked her up, to live in the moment. One breath after the other, step after step. Don’t think ahead, don’t think back. She had learned not to measure time in hours and years like mortals did because that way lay madness. Her measures were blinks and heartbeats, loves, fights, losses. Things that were bigger than a second, larger than a decade. She lived in the present and only in the present.

But seeing the other Buffy, remembering how lost and alone and needy she’d been had broken the dam that held back the memories and the three hundred years between then and now had come crashing down. 

And they had taken her breath away. 

“Finished?” a voice behind her asked and the only reason she did not spin around and kill whoever it was, was that she had long since felt Jack prickling at the edge of her senses. 

He had been standing on the catwalk for almost half an hour, watching her clean and reload, check and test all the guns strewn willy-nilly around her on the floor of the Hub, close to the water. She put the last gun – a man made one – back together with her eyes fixed on him, pulled the trigger a few times to make sure it wouldn’t jam, and then nodded as she slotted in a clip of ammo.

Jack knew her routines, knew her little quirks. He knew that when she started walking perimeters and doing inventory of armouries, it was best to leave her alone. To give her the space she needed to work through whatever was bugging her. He went to pick up some random, beautiful, evanescent human and sleep with them and she went to clean the guns. It spoke volumes of who they were underneath but the fact remained that sometimes, they needed it. Downtime. Simple things.

The time to pull their shit together and remind themselves of the here and now. Now and here. Without the space, it spelled nowhere. Sometimes, it took a lot of strength to not look at a clock and see hours and seconds. A lot of strength to stay on top of the years and memories and regrets. 

He walked round to the stairs and came down, watching as she put everything back in its place. He did not offer to help her. She would have refused.

It wasn’t until she had put away the last of the equipment that he spoke again. “Are you alright?”

“Sure.” Was she? She remembered now, those years. The Scoobies building up the New Council, acting like they had never betrayed her. Like she had not saved their asses. Dragging her across the world but not to fight, oh no. They had the mini slayers for that now. New meat for the grinder, new soldiers, all bright-eyed and eager. Who needed her anymore, the original? She was too stubborn, too headstrong, too tired for them. So they took her purpose from her, too, after they had taken everything else. 

And they pushed her away. Take a holiday, Buffy. See the world, Buffy. Have some fun, Buffy. They’d forgotten that death was all she was, forgotten that she had lost her lover, her purpose, her reason, her home. Everything that had been left, gone. And then the whammy. Immortality.

Whoops, messed up, you’re gonna live forever, sorry. Why was it that she had to forgive Willow for fucking her over for all eternity but the Scoobies didn’t have to forgive her for anything? Double standards and people that had grown to be someone she had not recognized. She had never asked for the power given to her, but they had taken theirs and run with it. Leaving her behind, wishing to be dead.

Was she alright?

She had been. But now?

Only a few days ago Gwen had accused her – via Jack – of being heartless. Maybe she was. Had been. Maybe she had become cold in her endless race to stay ahead of history.

But now?

The gates were open.

She sagged suddenly and if Jack hadn’t been there to wrap his arms around her, to hold on to her, she would have fallen. She would have simply fallen and never gotten up again.

And why should she? She had come full circle. Three hundred years after she had expected to die – after she had died – she had found herself, an empty girl. She could have peace now, couldn’t she?

Someone was sobbing and somehow she knew – despite the alien sound of it – that it was her. Too much, she thought. Too much. Jack leaving yet again, coming back, saying things she had never expected to hear. Ianto and all his mortal kindness and fire. Meeting John Hart, so much like her Spike, inside and out. Gwen’s accusations. And now this. Herself, lost. Too much.

Jack turned her around in his arms to she could bury her face in his shoulder and hold on for dear life, so she could cry and cry and cry for all that was lost, all that had been buried so long - _let the dead stay buried, gods, please_ \- for all the what ifs and maybes, for hopes and dreams and for what she was, today. Happier, lighter but without a past.

She felt it as Jack picked her up, carried her to the worn sofa and sat down, pulling her into his lap, holding her, cooing words in a language not yet invented. She noticed - through eyes almost swollen shut with tears – as the others turned off the CCTV feed and gathered around them, silent, watching.

Witnesses to something that was three centuries overdue.

Grief.

+

+

**Dissolve**

+

For the first time in what seemed forever, Jack wanted to sleep. Unlike Buffy, he usually didn’t mind not being able to sleep. It gave him more time to do all that needed doing and really, the nightmares kind of ruined the whole thing for him. But now, all he wanted was to close his eyes and _stop_. He’d even take the nightmares. 

His team was falling apart. Toshiko and Adam were isolating themselves more and more, Owen was good for nothing as soon as Tosh was around and Buffy’s headaches were starting to worry him. 

It was understandable that the stress of the past few weeks was taking its toll, really. She had gone through a lot of emotional stuff. Jack couldn’t imagine seeing his younger self, this careless, honourless, clueless version of himself. Buffy’s mini breakdown had been more than justified. But Jack had honestly thought the catharsis of crying it all out would solve the problem. Instead, Buffy had been having blazing migraines for the past three days.

Then Gwen lost all memory of Rhys, apropos of nothing. Stress, Owen said. Stress seemed to be the excuse of the day. Week maybe. 

And instead of holding his team together, Jack himself was seeing visions of his long lost little brother at every street corner now. Maybe they were all going crazy. Maybe the Hub, the Rift, was slowly sucking the sanity out of them, twisting them, turning them into something else. Only that couldn’t be it because then Gwen wouldn’t be the one affected worst. She had been on the team for the shortest time of all of them. It should be him who was forgetting things and right now, he couldn’t say he would mind. 

The slayer’s meltdown had reminded him of many things in his own past he had pushed away. Things he had walled up behind a dam of singular moments, endless seconds, breaths and smiles that stretched forever.

A hundred and fifty years since he had spoken his brother’s name. And suddenly he was falling apart at the seams, along with two of his people and he didn’t know _why_. 

Confide in me, Adam had told him. But what was there to confide? That he didn’t know himself anymore? That he was seeing ghosts? Stress. Stress, that was all. But he’d had stress before, a hundred damn years of it. Getting shot up by Daleks, fighting the Cybermen, saving the world, losing people to the race of time and death. Jack knew stress. He’d never had visions before. 

And Buffy had never lost her cool before. Crying, grieving for her own past self should have made her right as rain. That was how she worked. So why hadn’t it?

He mulled over the question as he made his way toward the tourist office. He had walked here from the aborted Weevil hunt, opting to let Adam take the SUV home. He needed time to clear his head. Time to figure out what was wrong with him and Gwen and Buffy.

Speaking of the devil. The blonde was leaning against the railing, looking out at the Bay. The wind was whipping her coat and hair around, ripping at her but she didn’t move. 

“How’s your head?” he asked as he came to a halt behind her, wrapping his arms securely around her waist.

“Killing me. Jack, this isn’t just stress, no matter what Owen says.”

So he wasn’t the only one drawing conclusions from the strange events of the past few days. Good to know he wasn’t just being paranoid. “I know. I keep seeing things… things that aren’t real.”

“So what is it?”

He shook his head and then shrugged because he knew she could feel the second motion. She leaned back into his chest and closed her eyes, breathing in deeply. “My head is going to explode if we don’t figure this out soon.”

“Mhm,” he murmured around a mouthful of her hair. “Then let’s get inside and crack this thing.”

“Let’s,” she agreed, taking his hand in hers, in true companion fashion. It was funny how, of all the things the Doctor showed and taught them, it was this small thing that stayed with all of them. Holding hands. When things got tough, the first thing they all did was reach for another hand, another living person. To keep them grounded, maybe. To help them stay sane. 

It was a good gesture.

But since there was currently no Doctor in sight, there was no running. They just lazily made their way to the invisible lift and then down into the Hub, quiet and powered down for the night since, without Jack, there was no-one there. 

Except, Buffy realized with a start, someone was there. Just over by the stairs next to Tosh’s station she could hear a heartbeat and small, stifled sobs.

“Ianto?” she let go of Jack’s hand to walk closer.

“You have to put me in the vaults,” Ianto said, voice thick with tears. Even in the dim light he looked a mess. Teary and sweaty, hair and eyes mad. He refused to look at either of his two lovers. “I killed three girls. Strangled them.”

Jack took a deep breath and crossed his arms tightly over his chest, wondering what the hell was going on. Buffy crouched in front of the young man, reaching for him. Her jerked back hard enough to hit his head on the stairs, yelling, “Stay away from me! I’m a monster.”

“Bullshit.” The slayer’s voice was sharp enough to cut right through the hysteria and freeze the archivist in his tracks. She stepped forward, wrapped her arms around him and held him as he struggled against her, unmoved by what should have been superior strength. Eventually Ianto just sagged, whether in relief or despair, he didn’t know. 

He just stopped fighting and clung to Buffy like she was the last solid thing on the event horizon of a dissolving world. He buried his face in her shoulder and sobbed incoherently. Jack stepped forward and for a moment, joined the embrace, adding his warmth, his solidity to Buffy’s.

Then he met her eyes in the dark and saw the same stone cold determination he knew was reflected in his own. Buffy’s migraines, his visions, Gwen’s amnesia. And now Ianto’s delusions – and they were delusions because no matter what Ianto thought he knew, Jack and Buffy knew him better and he was no killer.

This had to end.

Now.

+

+

**Forget**

+

The team was asleep, Retcon already coursing through their systems. Only Buffy and Jack were still up and about. The cleaning up, the final execution, was their job. It always had been. Ianto cleaned up bodies and messes, but they cleaned up people. It was a job neither of them wanted to paw off to the others. Some lines should stay uncrossed.

They made their way to the vaults in silence. There was no need to talk anymore. Adam. It had all been Adam. Jack’s visions, Ianto’s delusions, Gwen’s amnesia. And Buffy’s headaches, caused by her own mind fighting against the intrusion of something foreign and malignant. Adam. She grimaced at the name. The first human who wasn’t a human at all, but a construct of memories and dreams. 

She hung back as Jack talked to him – it – tried to make sense of the violation of them all. Poor little Adam, trying to survive. The funny part was that, if he had asked, Jack probably would have let him have enough memories to survive. Gods knew, they all had things they’d rather not remember. If Adam had the skill to take them away, they would have all lined up for him. But he hadn’t asked. And now he would be forgotten. 

She watched as Adam wove his web, offered his sweet temptation. And she watched as Jack - desperate for something even she did not understand – fell for it. She felt the alien reach out, toward Jack’s innermost, his lost memories, those he always kept locked up so tightly. She felt Adam reach and with a lunge born of protectiveness, she intercepted the probe and pulled him into her own head instead. 

+

Adam came to in the desert. Jack’s desert, he thought but then corrected his assumption when a shadow fell over him and he looked up to find her – Buffy. This strange, alien thing, whose mind had put up such a fight, whose memories were steel clad and waterproof, impenetrable. 

He scrambled to his feet, looking around, trying to find a crack to cling to in the world around him, something to get a handle on the memory, to use it. That was his speciality, after all. Twisting memories. Look at what he had made of a fleeting thought in Ianto’s head. A whole world of horror, based on a single thought, one that the man hadn’t even _meant_. 

So he reached out, cheering inwardly at finally getting inside her head, at finally reaching the treasure trove of memory and found – nothing. 

He froze. “This is not a memory.”

She smiled and the expression on her face was cold. And alien thing on such a sweet face. “No. This is a world _made_ of memories.”

A world… he felt dizzy suddenly, overwhelmed. Half a step back, away from her coldcold eyes, just away. He stumbled over a bit of rock buried in the sand, fell. Reached out for anything to steady him and held onto another jagged rock and - 

_a wooden stake into the heart, tear off the head, pain in her stomach, broken bones, swing the sword higher, bury the old man, find the lair, blink away the blood, howl in the dark, spit into their faces, feel the chains biting into flesh, hot pokers everywhere, the sharp sting of pain of rage and helplessness and fury and relief, the bite, the draw of blood, the coming darkness, panic and peace, the fear and then the dark_

\- He ripped his hand from the rock as if burnt, scrambled away, swallowing sand and dirt and gods of all worlds, what was that? His eyes were wide, too much white showing as he wrapped his arms around himself and tried to breathe. He loved the bad memories, all that emotion, all that power to feed from but not like that. A whole life in less than second, the pain of a decade condensed into the blink of an eye.

She was in front of him suddenly, crouching so she could look into his eyes, face blank. “Too much for you? Every rock is a dead girl, and every grain of sand,” she lifted her hand, letting sand fall from it, pitter-patting against his own bare forearms and there was a flash of life - _a dying breath_ \- in every one of them. “Every grain of sand a fallen enemy.”

She smiled at him again, but this time it was a sunny look, bright with madness and grief. “A million years of blood sacrifice and this is where they all went. Every single one, living here, with me.”

Something moved at the corner of his vision and he jerked around, desperate for another living thing - anything that was not her and the rocks that were girls, the sand that was monsters long dead and still howling in fury – and found a face as cold as hers, staring at him with black eyes, teeth bared, crude weapon in her hands. 

“She is the first,” Buffy said, still sounding like she was giving him the guided tour of a museum, not a… a _tomb_. “I am the last. And in between,” Her arm swept widely, including the entire world of dirt and dust, of sun and sky and dead things, “is only death.”

She turned back to him, the other one, the dark one, at her shoulder, grinning bloodthirstily. “Are you hungry, Adam? Would you like some memories?”

The expressions of both their faces – savage and wild, civilized and smooth – were of polite interest, blank and shallow and the wind was throwing grains of sand at him, one by one, each one filled with another horror and Adam knew that he had met his match.

From the void he had come to devour human memories, to feed until he was bright as the stars and here she was, silly blonde little girl, and she would choke him with horrors worse than the nothing that awaited him in forgetting.

Adam, the memory thief, returned to the waking world screaming and sobbing and when Jack swallowed his bitter pill of forgetting, when Buffy gulped down her own with a spark of savage murder in her eyes, he only whimpered. 

Whimpered and faced oblivion with the faces of a million dead girls dancing before his eyes.

+

+

**Trap**

+

“Why can’t alien space ships ever crash anywhere nice?” 

“No idea, sir. No idea.” Simon, trying in vain to keep his coat wrapped around him in the strong sea wind, stumbled forward as the UNIT soldier behind him barked a laugh. 

He smiled vaguely at the man, never quite sure how to act around the square-jawed elite soldiers that were – supposedly - under his command. Under his command. The phrase threatened to make him laugh hysterically. Simon wasn’t military. Never had been. What he was, was a genius from a poor family who’d never quite managed to give him what he needed. So when a man in a red cap had knocked on their front door and offered to pay for Simon’s entire education in return for five years of service afterwards, they hadn’t quite managed to turn him down.

Now, ten years later, Simon was a doctor. But instead of revolutionizing modern medicine, he was standing on some tiny forlorn island in the middle of nowhere, waiting until the big wigs gave him the okay to go inside a spaceship and examine whatever alien corpses were still inside. There was something wrong with that picture. Very wrong.

“What are we waiting for anyway, Captain Henderson?” He turned to the highest ranking soldier on site with a curious look. He may have formally been in charge of the men, but Henderson was their boss and Simon preferred a sort of partnership with the man over trying to boss him around. Plus, he was at least ten years younger than the other and didn’t know what he was doing. He also still didn’t understand why he, as a science division member, had command over soldiers, because different departments, hello, but. UNIT didn’t always make sense on the best of days.

Henderson shrugged and motioned for everyone but the two on guard duty to follow him inside the command tent that had been put up. Once inside, Simon relaxed his rigid hold on his coat and dared breathe through his mouth again. 

“There’s some weird sort of code on the hatch locks. We can’t get in on our own so we’re waiting on some kind of tech expert to come up from Cardiff.”

“Cardiff? What’s in Cardiff?” Simon was fairly sure that Cardiff had no UNIT base. He didn’t know all that much about his employers, true, but he was sure about that. Even a lab geek like him knew the very basics of what went on in the world. Most of the time. He sighed and poured himself some stale, half cold coffee. He wasn’t made for the field. Really.

“Torchwood Three.”

“Hold on, there’s more than one Torchwood?”

“Four actually,” a new voice offered from the mouth of the tent. Simon shot around so fast he was sure he had just given himself whiplash. His panic was justified. Asking stupid questions in front of the wrong brass could end nastily. But instead of an old man carved from rock, there was a man who didn’t look much older than his own twenty three years. His dark hair was wind swept but his suit immaculate. Beside him stood a tiny Asian woman with a bag slung over her shoulder and a small smile on her face. She looked kind, Simon thought.

The man continued, “But Torchwood One fell in the battle of Canary Wharf, Torchwood Two is a very strange man in a kilt and Torchwood Four got lost. So there’s really only us.”

He delivered the whole monologue in a deadpan tone before holding his hand out to Henderson and smiling dryly at the man. “Ianto Jones and this is Dr. Toshiko Sato, Torchwood Three. You asked for assistance?”

Henderson took the offered hand, shook it, nodded. Simon felt a moment of intense jealousy for Ianto Jones, at ease around the soldiers, on a stormy island, about to try and crack the code of an alien door lock. It wasn’t fair. 

Then Dr. Sato smiled and held up her bag asking, “What do you need me to do?”

+

They moved the tent so part of the spacecraft was protected from the weather and Dr. Sato’s – call me Tosh – equipment didn’t get sea sprayed. She set up shop on a nearby table and immediately went into techno babble mode with one of the UNIT team that had tried and failed to open the hatch of the ship.

Mr. Jones made sure she had everything she needed and then sort of drifted away from the action, content, it seemed, to watch his colleague work. Apparently, technology was her forte, not his. 

Simon found himself a corner to sit in and wait until he was needed, watching everything around him. Eventually a low ranking soldier drifted over to Mr. Jones and – when he didn’t get sent away after a few minutes – asked, “Is it true that you guys can do whatever you want, over in Cardiff? Sir.”

Jones looked at the man, not unkindly, but very wryly. “Define ‘whatever we want’.”

“Well, they say… they say you have a dinosaur, sir.”

Simon snorted into his coffee and then almost chocked on it when Jones returned, completely serious, “A pterodactyl, actually. Her name’s Myfanwy.”

“Are you serious?”

“Dead,” Jones confirmed and then added, “We also give guided tours every two hours, snack included.” 

The soldier, finally realizing that he sounded like a retarded fan girl, blushed and stammered an apology. Across the tent, Toshiko laughed and chided, “Ianto, stop scaring the UNIT people and get Jack on the phone. I think he might know something about this kind of craft.”

+

An hour later, the code was cracked and the hatch open. Jones and Sato insisted on coming inside to have a look around, too and so, after the initial scan and scouting, Simon and the two Torchwood agents were escorted inside the ship by a group of soldiers.

An hour and twenty five seconds later, Simon noticed that a) the ship was a lot bigger on the inside and b) there was something moving to his right.

An hour and thirty seconds later, the entirety of the soldiers that had remained outside was sucked into the ship and the hatch snapped shut with a resounding bang. 

An hour and thirty two seconds later, they were surrounded by at least fifty small, orange-y aliens with guns trained on them. They were all ordered to give up their weapons or die. Everyone grumbled and finally, on Jones’s command, gave up their weapons. Simon wasn’t sure if Jones had the authority to order them to surrender but he seemed to full of integrity and poise that no-one questioned him.

Even the dainty Dr. Sato pulled two guns out, one from the back of her waistband, the other from somewhere under her demure knee length skirt. Simon was not the only one to look at the small woman with new appreciation after that. But he was the only one who blushed when asked to give up his weapon and having to reveal that he was completely and utterly unarmed. 

An hour and seven minutes later, their entire group of twenty three found themselves in a cell without windows, doors or a way to reach the outside world.

They had walked right into the trap. 

+

+

**Rescue**

+

“Miles,” Henderson barked as soon as they were alone, “When is the next check up due?”

“Two hours, Sir,” Miles returned, sounding like his death sentence had already been signed. 

“We’re due in twelve minutes,” Jones spoke into the dark silence that ensued.

Henderson rounded on him in surprise and another solider asked, “Isn’t that a bit paranoid? You only just called twenty minutes ago.”

Jones didn’t deem the question worthy of an answer, just pointedly looked around their cell, one eyebrow raised in silent scorn. Sa – Toshiko, Simon figured he could call her by her first name since they were all going to die – smiled grimly. “Paranoia has nothing to do with it. We are a six person team manning a Rift with an average of fifteen confirmed breakthroughs.”

“A month?” Henderson sounded impressed.

“A week.” 

Oh. That made two a day. That meant… oh. There was obviously much more to Torchwood Three than anyone knew. Suddenly Dr. Sato’s two guns didn’t seem enough.

“So, what, twenty minutes until Torchwood informs UNIT, two hours until they get here? We could be at the other end of the system by then if we take off soon.” 

Toshiko shook her head and sat next to Jones who wrapped an easy arm around her. “Twenty minutes until Torchwood mobilises. Thirty minutes until they’re here, if they can get the new teleport system to work.”

“And then they’re going to storm this ship with four people?”

“Three. One has to stay behind and Riftsit.”

Sounds of disbelief, of derision and desperation rose all across the room as people started getting used to the fact that they were going to die. Simon didn’t join in on the hysteric laughter and grim stoicism. 

Instead he watched the two Torchwood agents as they sat, leaning into each other, looking ruffled but not scared. Not like they were going to die. They believed what they said. They were sure, absolutely sure, that their people would get them out, against all odds. 

He found their utter conviction contagious.

+

It only took twenty two minutes for the Torchwood team to get there, literally. There was a streak of blue from the ceiling that was their only warning before three people suddenly materialised in the middle of the cell. One of them was a tall man in a big honking coat, the other a smaller man in scruffy jeans and leather jacket. The third was a woman – more of a girl really – who looked like she belonged in a fashion magazine. 

All three immediately zeroed in on Toshiko and Jones. The man in the coat grinned widely as he stepped forward and pulled them both to their feet. “You two are definitely trouble magnets.”

The blonde woman stepped forward, pulling two guns out of the holsters on either side of her hips, handing them over, handle first. The two unarmed agents took them and quickly checked them over before tucking them away. “No heavy arsenal?” Jones asked, looking amused.

“No time to reconfigure the teleport for freight. So, who’s the boss around here?” The man in the coat looked around curiously, obviously trying to find the highest ranking officer. Simon didn’t even try to get noticed. He had no clue what to do. Henderson was the man for the job. 

He stepped forward with a sour look on his face, “Captain Henderson, Sir. May I ask why you thought it was smart to teleport _into_ the prison cells?”

The man grinned and returned, completely unconcerned, “Captain Jack Harkness, pleased to meet ya.”

“Stop it,” the second man snapped. “You can flirt later.”

Captain Harkness rolled his eyes and turned back to Henderson. “You see, it’s like this. When Ianto sent me the data on the ship, I couldn’t help but notice that it was a Ritlic slave carrier. Lazy bastards, don’t bother catching their goods. Just wait until people come to them, lock them up and off they go. As for why we’re here and not on the other side of that door,” he spun on his heel, marched toward where the door had melted into the wall earlier and started pawing the smooth surface. After a moment he gave a small cheer and a panel slid to one side, revealing a console hidden underneath. “This isn’t a cell, it’s a cargo hold. And if you know where to look for it… Tosh, crack that code?”

Toshiko took a close look at the console and within moments, started trying. By the count of thirty, she had the door open. The blonde woman and the nameless man secured the hallway while Harkness barked, “My team to me. I got point. Try not to shoot our own. That means you, Owen. The rest of you,” here he flashed a somewhat disconcerting grin, “Try to keep up.”

Then the five Torchwood people were out the door, moving as smoothly as any UNIT team Simon had ever seen, maybe even more so. Harkness seemed to implicitly trust his subordinates and they all covered each other in a way that belied a lot of practice. Even the unarmed blonde fit into the smooth movements, not a hindrance but an… asset?

“Uh-oh,” the short guy – Owen - suddenly said, looking at a sort of scanner in his hand. “Tosh, take that,” he said and flung it in her direction without looking, gripping his gun in both hands. 

She caught it deftly and quickly started rattling off, “Intersection ahead, incoming from three sides. I’m counting over fifty alien life forms, probably all armed. Energy weapons, no bullets. We need to go left. Oh, this is bad. The material of the walls will bounce our bullets. We’re basically unarmed.”

The blonde – Buffy – groaned in annoyance. “This is so going to hurt. Jack?”

Harkness nodded and stepped back, handing his own ancient gun to Henderson. They advanced down the hall the same as before, only now the people at the head of their group were unarmed. How the hell did they plan to fight in such an enclosed space, without weapons, when the enemy was armed?

By the time they got close to the intersection, they all hung back, blocked by Torchwood. Only Buffy and Harkness kept moving forward.

“What the hell, Captain,” Henderson snarled, “Are you crazy? You can’t take them alone!”

The Captain shrugged, threw a grin over his shoulder and said, “Not enough space for any more people and you heard my tech. If she says our guns are a liability, they are. Oh, and if you shoot me on accident, you buy me dinner.”

+

At first, Simon had been sure they were all going to die. Then Torchwood had shown up and he had allowed himself a glimmer of hope. Harkness seemed to know what he was doing at least. His confidence plummeted fast as he watched two unarmed people march toward an entire horde of hostile, armed aliens hell bent on selling them as slaves somewhere in the galaxy. 

And then they _moved_. 

Buffy – and what a name that was for such a tiny, fragile, deadly thing – ducked under the first energy beam aimed her way and rolled forward, both legs shooting out to kick the shooting alien in the stomach. It sailed backward, taking half a dozen of its tightly packed comrades with it.

She came out of her roll in a low crouch, swiped the legs out from under five more and ripped the guns from two of them. She flung them blindly in the direction of the ‘captives’, where Jones and Owen picked them up and started firing.

Then –only a second or two after the fight had started - Harkness reached the enemy and things got chaotic. Simon watched as the two of them moved through the throngs of orange aliens like they were nothing. Harkness broke bones and took weapons, throwing them back toward his team, who covered his back.

He was spectacular.

But it was the small woman by his side that scared Simon. She didn’t just break bones, she shattered them, didn’t disarm the enemy but killed them. She snapped necks, flung the small creatures into walls and entirely ignored any gun blasts that hit her. She never missed a step, she never stumbled, never hesitated, never looked around her to orient herself. She just moved and the aliens fell like they were made of matches. 

She was death. Death dancing in the tight confines of an alien spacecraft, unhindered by such measly things as the laws of gravity and her own body.

+

+

**Come**

+

Simon was stunned into silence when he looked at his wrist watch and realized that less than an hour had passed since he and the rest of his UNIT companions had been taken hostage to be sold as slaves. 

Less than an hour. That meant it had taken only… ten minutes or so to kill every single member of the crew of the ship. Ten minutes. Less, actually. Five maybe? Five minutes and fifty dead.

It chilled him.

What also chilled him was the amount of damage Harkness and Buffy, apparently his second in command, had taken. Owen – introduced as Dr. Owen Harper – had taken over the tent to tend to various wounds sustained during the fight. 

Seven soldiers had been hit by stray energy beams and someone had a broken wrist from getting shoved out of the way of something. There were a few more scrapes and cuts. Harkness and Buffy both refused to be treated until the doctor had taken care of everyone else.

Since Harkness had a dislocated shoulder, multiple burns, a busted lip, a broken nose and probably a shattered cheekbone and Buffy seemed even worse off, Simon decided that it was time to put his blind panic to the side and pretend that he’d actually earned his degree. His hands were almost steady again. That had to mean something. As long as he didn’t have to perform brain surgery, he should be fine.

One of those nice and steady hands landed on Harper’s shoulder. The man jerked around, obviously still in full combat mode. Funny, Simon had never thought it possible to be a doctor and a fighter to equal degrees. He nodded toward the two stubborn fighters in the far corner of the tent, licking their wounds under the awed gazes of everyone in the tent. UNIT had new stories to tell about the crazy people of Torchwood Three who had a pterodactyl and fought aliens barehanded for fun.

“Take care of them. I can deal with the other injuries.” Simon said, keeping his voice low.

Harper eyed him up and down and back up again and then asked, “Who’re you?”

“Simon Dale. Doctor.” He still forgot to add the title to his name. It made him feel silly. 

“Fine then. Patch up your idiots. I’ll deal with mine.” He threw a dark look at the two idiots in question, his expression strangely tender even as he scowled. Then he grabbed his gear and took off, leaving Simon to let out a soft sigh of relief. 

The man had a wickedly sharp and nasty mind and he had been going on about UNIT idiocy ever since they had been out of mortal danger, muttering about stupid UNIT personnel not realizing they were walking into a trap that might as well have been set by a kindergartener. 

Someone had tried defending UNIT by pointing out that two Torchwood members had fallen for the trap as well. In response, Harper had started making the man’s stitches larger and sloppier and calmly pointed out that Torchwood had also realized what was going on and put their base into lockdown by using exorbitant amounts of energy to power an alien teleport device in order to save their collective asses. And that Torchwood had actually been useful, while UNIT had hung back, disarmed and clueless and waited to be led around like ducklings. 

Round about then Simon had decided to interfere and save the man from the doctor’s ire and sharp tongue. He didn’t undo the sloppy stitching though. 

Toshiko found him later with a cup of coffee just as he sent the last solider off. She handed it to him with a smile and sat next to him. “Owen said you took over here so he could help Buffy and Jack.”

Simon shrugged and blushed. 

“Thank you for that.”

“No problem.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the frantic action around them as UNIT tried to find its spine and start dealing with the fallout of what had just happened. Then Simon asked, “Are they…”

He trailed off, biting his lip, feeling stupid for speaking. 

“Is who what?” she asked, kindly. She was a kind person, Simon thought. Even if she kept guns hidden in her garters.

“The Captain and his second. Are they always… like this?”

“Crazy, intense, self sacrificing and absolutely homicidal?”

He nodded, numbly, and she giggled a bit. He thought he might be developing a crush on her. “Yeah.”

“Always crazy and intense. Self sacrificing they save for fights and homicidal for when one of us is in danger. We are all very protective of each other.”

Simon thought of the giant UNIT complex he worked in, of all the strangers he met every day, none of which ever asked his name. He thought of being stuck in that cargo hold, alone and cold and scared while Jones and Toshiko had curled around each other, safe in their belief – their knowledge – that someone would move heaven and hell to get them out. 

“That sounds… nice.”

She smiled and took a sip of her own coffee – which was drinkable suddenly – and shrugged. “It is. We’re family.”

“You don’t happen to need a doctor, do you?” It was out before he knew it and he grimaced at his own babbling.

This time she really laughed. “Afraid not. Sorry.”

He shook his head, waving her apology away. “That’s alright. UNIT owns my soul for another three years anyway.”

“How come?”

He opened his mouth, about to answer, when Harper called from across the tent. “Oi! Tosh. Get your stuff, we’re blowing this place.”

She stood, already gathering her gear as she asked, “Already? I thought Jack wanted to argue with UNIT about getting the ship.”

“Jack,” Harkness said from where he was sitting with his shirt stripped off and his shoulder patched up, “Can hear you. And I can be just as intimidating over the phone.”

“What he means,” the blonde at his side supplied, “Is that he has doctor’s orders to ‘give it a goddamn rest’.”

“Is that a medical term?” That was Jones, standing in the entrance of the tent, smiling slightly.

“Yes,” Harper snapped, and threw his a backpack at the other man who caught it deftly and glared.

Simon sat, forgotten in his corner, watching the seamless, smooth and so very comfortable way Torchwood Three interacted with each other. Harper and Jones nodded at him as they left, Toshiko smiled and waved.

Then they were gone and Henderson called from outside, “Dale! We need you to do a basic autopsy before we can move those bodies to base.”

“Coming,” Simon called, grimacing wryly to himself. “Coming.”

Less than an hour but somehow things felt different. Or maybe that was just the bump on the back of his skull. He should probably find a mirror and look at that. Maybe he had a concussion. 

It would explain the daft little grin on his face.

+

 

 

+

[](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v295/faith1922/?action=view&current=LifeTimeDeath-1.png)

+

**Time VI**

+

They found Rose tottering down the sidewalk, a chain smoking Jackie following on her heels, trying to get her to slow down. For someone with such short legs, the toddler was surprisingly fast. 

Always would be, Jack thought, grinning slightly at the sight of a three-year-old outmanoeuvring her own mother. Oh, how she would run one day, run and run and run, right beside the most wonderful and insane person the universe had ever produced, seeing sights that had driven lesser people mad.

But for now she was simply a tiny ball of dirty blonde hair and big soulful eyes, impossibly curious and eager.

Jack stood leaning against a lamp post, his coat wrapped tightly around him against the early London autumn. Buffy stood by his side, bundled up in jeans and a pea coat, refusing strictly to even get close to early nineties fashion. It would have been funny, the way she still was so critical of something as simple as clothes, if it hadn’t been tinged by something deeper and so very dysfunctional. 

Three hundred years and she was still waiting for something, holding out for a time that Jack could not guess at. Still clinging to an idea, a concept of who she might have been. Some days Jack thought he might have liked to meet that person she had once been. Others he was glad he never would because he didn’t have to mourn something he had never had.

Farther down the street Jackie stepped on her cigarette butt and hurried after Rose, calling her daughter’s name.

“Never was big on doing what Mom wanted, was she?” Buffy asked, a smile in her voice. 

“Looks like it.”

Rose stopped, turned to track her mother’s progress and then took off again with a shrieking laugh that cut the cold air into sharp and brilliant things. Jack watched her, soaking in her every movement, every sound. It was pathetic, being this attached to someone he had only spent a few short months with, more than a century ago, but he couldn’t help it. Rose was his connection to the stars, to the Doctor. To the wonderful and beautiful and fascinating side of something he had only seen the horrors of for too long. 

Every year he became duller, but in his mind, Rose and the Doctor always stayed sharp Technicolor, just as they had been when he had saved her from falling to her death in the middle of the London Blitz.

Jackie sped up her steps and Rose ran faster, carried by her own momentum, as toddlers were wont to be. She would fall if she tried to stop now. 

The car came around the corner at reasonable speeds, but still too fast for a three-year-old to register and avoid. Jack shot forward just as Rose was about to pass him by and run into the car’s path, snatching her up under her arms, swinging her in a complete circle before setting her on his hip.

Her laughter never faltered, never changed, as she avoided death by an inch. Good old Rose. 

“Who you?” she demanded, squirming in his hold, smile splitting her small face almost in two.

“I’m Jack,” he answered, feeling safe in the knowledge that there were a million Jacks and that this Rose was three years old, far from his sharp, bright girl. 

“Jack,” Rose intoned, smacking her palms against his chest, giggling. Jackie finally reached the happily fooling duo and almost choked as she stammered a heartfelt thanks and tried to catch her breath at the same time.

“No problem,” Buffy said from Jack’s side, introducing herself to the situation for the first time. “Jack has a thing for damsels in distress.” 

The smile said much more than her words did and Rose started trying to pronounce ‘damsels in distress’ with little success, stumbling over the ‘s’.

“No,” Jackie said as she reached out for her daughter, “Really, thank you. She would have run right in front of that car and I was too far away to get there and – “

“Hey,” Buffy put a hand on the woman’s arm, mainly to distract her from the fact that her daughter refused to budge from Jack’s arms, “It’s okay. They do what they want. We understand. And nothing happened, right?”

The frazzled mother nodded in agreement. “Do you have kids? You two? You make a cute couple, you know?”

Buffy shook her head, one hand rising of its own volition to tug on one of Rose’s messy pigtails and tickle her side. “No kids. I did raise my little sister, though. After Mom died. Puberty was hell.”

Jack’s eyes widened as he looked at his companion, surprise painted on his face. She’d never told him about a sister. A mother. For some reason, he had never considered where she had come from. That she must have had a family once, siblings, parents. Maybe even aunts and uncles. Strange. 

Rose, noticing that he was distracted, squirmed, demanding to be put down. Jackie took her and scolded her for running so far ahead, for almost getting hurt by the car. Cars were dangerous.

“You hear me, Rose Tyler?!”

Jack and Buffy watched for a minute, more awed than they should have been by something so normal, so simple. Then the slayer slipped her hand into Jack’s bigger one and tugged him away before either of the Tyler women noticed. 

It was better than having to say goodbye again.

+

+

**Shower**

+

By the time they got back to Cardiff – slowly this time, with a borrowed UNIT vehicle - Tosh had fallen asleep in the backseat. She was all head and action in a combat situation but she burned out quickly afterwards. Owen, in a rare moment of tenderness, tucked her into his side and let her sleep with her head on his shoulder, holding her close.

They had all gotten a nasty scare when Ianto had called and asked for help with the door codes to the spaceship only to realize after he had hung up just what UNIT had found. A ship full of slave traders that specialized in setting traps to collect their goods instead of catching them. The entire crash landing had been a trap and by the time Jack had remembered where he knew the type of door lock from, Ianto hadn’t answered his phone anymore. 

For a split second, they’d all died just a bit in the Hub. Then Jack and Buffy had thrown themselves into rigging the alien teleport system to work – just once – while Owen and Gwen had gathered gear. For once, Gwen had not even put up a fight about being left behind. She’d just looked at them with wide, scared eyes and sent them off with the order to bring back Ianto and Toshiko. In one piece. Breathing.

It had been Ianto who had called the former police officer to tell her everyone was okay because Buffy and Jack had been too out of it to do it themselves. They had died. Both of them had died in the fight because they had insisted on going up against the enemy alone when they realized guns would be useless. And of course they had hidden how badly they were off to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

Ianto had known that Buffy was good at hand to hand, but what he had seen today had been… terrifying. And beautiful. She had ripped into the small orange monsters with the ferocity of a wild animal and the precision of a machine. And it had taken its toll.

Owen agreed to take Tosh home and make sure she was alright and Ianto got the UNIT soldier playing chauffeur to drop the rest of the group off at Buffy’s place. With patience and care the young Welshman steered his two lovers into the bathroom where he cleaned them up and helped them get rid of the bandages and butterfly band aids they didn’t need anymore. All for show but God, the wounds underneath had been so real only hours before. 

Real and ugly and a reminder of how very not normal they both were. They would outlive him. They would live and live and live after he was long gone and they would forget him, forget the mortal man they had once loved. On the one hand, the thought comforted him. On the other, it made him feel old and bitter and fragile, especially after a day like the one he’d just had.

“Never,” Buffy suddenly spoke, sitting on the closed toilet lid, wrapped in a fuzzy towel, waiting for the boys to finish cleaning off the blood and grime. She looked less exhausted than Jack, despite having taken more damage. Ianto had asked once why that was and the answer he received had been something to do with people dying and Buffy feeding. He had decided after that that there were things he didn’t need to know. 

_Let the dead stay buried._ That was what Jack sometimes said when he thought no-one was listening. But Ianto listened. He always listened to the two of them and he knew things he wasn’t sure they knew about themselves. Knew, for example, that he wasn’t sharing his bed with humans at all. They weren’t just humans who happened to be immortals. They were something else entirely. And he loved them enough not to ask, cared enough not to want to know. They would live long after he was gone. Why spoil what little time they had with unnecessary questions?

“Never what?” Jack asked, scrubbing at his chest.

“Ianto was thinking that we will forget him one day.” 

The archivist considered being mad at her for sneaking a peek in his head but she was tired and her shields were down. Besides, she was a psychic, not a telepath. She wasn’t reading his thoughts, just getting hunches. Very clear hunches. Hunches about every morose thought he was having while cleaning the blood and stench of death off his lovers.

“Oh,” Jack said and pulled Ianto close by the hip, wrapping his free arm around his neck. “Never. Not if we live to see the end of the universe. _Never_. Understood?”

“That is stupid, Sir. You will live forever. Logic dictates that you will forget me, eventually.”

“Logic has nothing to do with it,” Jack growled as Buffy shucked her towel and re-entered the shower stall. 

“We might forget your face, your voice.” She breathed against his neck, “Maybe even the way you laugh. But we won’t forget what you mean to us, Ianto Jones. What you are.”

And then the Captain kissed him and Buffy held him close and Ianto closed his eyes and did not ask what he was to them. He was afraid he already knew. 

Sanity.

Reason. 

So many things no human being should ever have to be for another, much less two. 

But he was okay with that. Okay with being their anchor. 

The world needed Buffy and Jack and they needed him. So he washed the blood off their bodies and held them close as they lay in bed, pretending to sleep with their eyes wide open and eternity stretching in front of them.

+

+

**Fight**

+

Martha yawned as she went over her fake CV for the millionth time. She was tired as hell and too wired to sleep. Even Owen had given up on keeping her company hours ago and gone home, leaving her alone in the Hub. She knew she should be getting back to her hotel to catch a few hours of sleep so she was at the top of her game for infiltrating the Pharm. But then she’d saved the world on less sleep before.

She looked up from the files when she heard the cog door – and she still wasn’t over that, cog door leading to secret underground lair that looked like a cross between Star Trek and Hackers – open. She stood and made her way up from the medical bay to find Buffy poking around one of the workstations.

She was wearing the same clothes she had when she had left hours ago, except for the dark red men’s shirt. Martha was pretty sure Ianto had worn that the last time she’d seen it.

“Hey,” she said, causing the other woman to whirl around in what Martha suspected was mostly fake surprise. She couldn’t figure the woman out. The Doctor spoke highly of her but seemed wary of her, too. Jack praised her to the heavens and all of Torchwood Three seemed to listen to her as much as to the Captain. 

“Martha. You should be in bed.”

“So should you?”

Buffy shrugged and typed a command into the computer that put it back to sleep. “There was a Rift spike. The team’s asleep and Jack is getting his eight hours of shut eye for the week.”

“Oh, he really does sleep so little?” Martha had never believed him before when he’d told her he could go forever without sleep. The blonde just nodded and started looking through print-outs she picked up from behind Tosh’s work station. Martha watched for a few minutes, leaning against the wall before deciding what the hell. She had saved the world, she could do this.

“So, ehm.” Buffy looked up, expectantly, “that’s Ianto’s shirt.”

“Yup.”

“Does that mean you and Ianto…”

“Yup.”

“But when I talked to him today, he said he and Jack were… dabbling.”

This time the surprise was genuine. “He actually said dabbling? Jack is going to kill him when he hears that.”

O-kay, Martha thought. Not helpful. She decided to spell things out because, damn it, if the Doctor had taught her anything it was to never stifle curiosity. “So, Jack and Ianto?”

“Yup.” This was getting old.

“And you and Ianto?”

“Me and Jack and Ianto, actually. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

It was, but now she was blushing. She knew Jack was a bit…deviant and God knew, her little sister had more than one crazy story to tell – stories Jack had babbled on about to fill the silence as she awkwardly fed and cared for him for a whole year as well as she could but never well enough – but all three of them? And not just shagging but… having a relationship? Wow. That was just… wow.

She looked away, studying the floor at her feet. “Yeah. Sorry, none of my business. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“You didn’t. I told you. Which I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t wanted to. Plus, I owe you.”

Martha’s head shot up in surprise. “Owe me?” she croaked.

“I may not remember what exactly happened, but I know that we all lost time when Jack was gone and I catch enough glimpses of his dreams and memories to know that whatever happened to make us lose that time, was bad. And I also know that you made it better. You looked after Jack when I couldn’t. I also suspect you saved the world. So yes, I owe you.”

“You remember?”

A shrug. She put the papers down and perched on a desk. “Like I said, some parts. People dying. The Doctor. That word, _Toclafane_. The Time Lord bogey man. Fairy tales. It doesn’t all make sense. Jack’s memories don’t help much. They’re fractured. He died a lot, didn’t he?”

Martha cringed and nodded, remembering him in torn and dirty clothes, chained for an entire year, dead whenever the Master felt particularly bored or angry. She was glad that she had not seen it with her own eyes until the very end. Her family’s haunted looks when they talked about the year on the Valiant was more than enough.

“But how can you know all these things? They are gone. Never happened.”

“That’s me. I put the chic in psychic.”

For almost half an hour the younger woman watched as Buffy flitted about the Hub, analyzing readings, checking the CCTV footage of the area in question and just generally being productive. Torchwood Three seemed a lot like the Doctor’s endearingly mad activism but when it came down to it, they were organized enough to face almost anything. 

There was something very calming about know that, about watching the other former companion working with sure hands, doing things she had done a million times before.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Buffy smiled but didn’t look up. “You know, that’s a bad question. It always warns people that whatever you want from them is going to be uncomfortable. Just ask.”

“Why do you do this?”

This time she did look up from the screen, hands stilling on the keyboard. “Told you, everyone else is sleeping.”

“No, I mean, this. All of this. You and the Doctor and Jack. You’re all so old. You could, I don’t know, find a quiet corner somewhere in the universe, stop fighting. But you’re always on the front lines.”

“You know,” Buffy said, a mock frown on her face, “My immortality used to be a well kept secret. Jack’s, too.”

Martha grimaced, conveying that she was sorry without saying a word. She’d just heard so many stories from both the Doctor and Jack. Buffy shrugged her off and made her way to the couch where she sprawled, looking small in the borrowed shirt she wore. She patted the space next to her and Martha sat.

“We’re soldiers singing songs of peace. But when we’re actually handed it, we haven’t got the slightest idea what to do with it. We’d probably die from boredom.”

The laugh was abrupt and involuntarily. “So you’re saying that you save the universe on a regular basis because it keeps you from getting _bored_?!”

Buffy seemed to think that over for a moment before nodded. “Yup. That’s what I’m saying.”

“You’re crazy.”

“It’s the adrenaline. Makes your brain go wonky.” She lifted one lazy hand and twirled a finger around her temple, grinning.

+

+

**Die**

+

It happened in slow motion.

The Professor aiming, Jack’s gun up and ready, Martha in the way, Owen in front of her, Buffy coming from the side, seeing the mad scientist’s intent before he realized it himself, knowing as she ran that she would be too late.

And then Owen fell.

He fell and she could feel death unfurling, uncurling at her feet, could feel it touch that part inside of her that was not human but god. She looked at Jack over the tableau of panic and fear and rage and knew he felt the same thing, or rather, the exact opposite.

Where the other inside her grew, fed on death, a part of him shrank and dulled. Life faded and Death reigned. A minute ago Owen had been his, bright, mortal, _alive_. Now he belonged to Buffy. 

He belonged to Death.

She wished he didn’t.

+

+

**Live**

+

The girls were crying and Ianto was holding together simply because no-one else was. Martha was hiding her tears under scrubs and a mask, getting ready to do the autopsy, Tosh was silent and deadly pale and Gwen could be heard hiccoughing from crying so hard.

Buffy just stood to the side, watching them gravitate toward each other, hugging, holding hands. Seeking comfort. She deliberately kept away from them, looking no-one in the eye. 

She could feel Owen. He was dead and that meant he was in her domain now. His death fed her, made her feel strong, vital. It gave her power. Jack hadn’t spoken to her since Owen’s heart had stopped and she knew he was tempted, so very tempted, to be disgusted with her. 

Just like the Doctor always had, he wanted to hate her for what she was. Death. People died, they watched people die and no matter how much she grieved their leaving, she also always profited from it. Every living thing fed Jack and every dying thing fed her. She existed because people died. People like Owen, good people, young people. People who should live. She couldn’t help what she was, but impotence was no match for grief. So she stayed away and let them cry, sending what love she had toward the fading spark that was Owen Harper in the dark.

Here she was, another soldier down, the old ache, the hole inside of her yawning widely, heart breaking and tired, so tired. How many had she buried over the years? How many more would come? And still part of her felt _good_. She was disgusted with herself.

And then Jack came, yelling and full of energy and manic hope, forbidding anyone from touching Owen and she knew that he was going to do something stupid. 

He came back hours later with a box. The second glove. She followed the others into his office, listened to them rattle off their protests and then, when they fell silent she stepped forward and said, “You want to use the glove to connect with him and then feed him.”

He looked at her and when their eyes met, his voice filled the room, heavy and metallic, “Yes.”

It was funny how long she had been waiting for him to finally accept that part of himself and now that he had, she wished he wouldn’t. She wished he would speak in his normal, smooth voice, because then she could have dissuaded him. But not like this. Not with the deity speaking through the man.

“You want to feed him forever?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

The others were shrinking back from him, the voice that was a million, but Tosh spoke. “It will kill you, Jack, like Suzie was killing Gwen.”

“No it won’t. Gwen is mortal. We are not.” He was not talking of anyone but himself but he still used the plural and his voice echoed horribly.

+

Martha had never heard Jack speak like this. His voice was tinny, far away but filled with something _more_. It felt like holding the Doctor’s watch, but so much stronger. It was the heart of a dying sun, the centre of the storm. It was _everything_. She could feel every molecule of her body reacting, resonating with that voice. Jack was everywhere.

And while they all backed up, away from him, Buffy stood her ground, calm and small compared to his large frame.

“Owen is mine,” she suddenly said and her voice, too, was a terrible thing. Not one voice, but a legion of voices, all speaking through her. Martha felt cold, the same kind of cold she had felt walking across the Radiation Pits of Europe and through burnt Japan. The same, slow ache of lost things.

Jack raised the glove and said, “I bring life.”

“I carry the dead,” Buffy returned. The words were ritual and power, age and wisdom and law.

“Not this one.” Their voices, oh God, their voices. It was how Martha had always imagined the voice of God to sound like. Maybe it did.

“You challenge me?”

“Two minutes. Let me have him for two minutes.” The voices of God, bartering for a soul.

“Then you return him to me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Gwen finally found her voice and stepped forward, ignorant of the maelstrom she was stepping into as she broke the eye contact between Buffy and Jack. “What the fuck are you talking about? Owen is dead. He belongs to no-one.”

Buffy blinked once, slowly and when her eyes opened the weight in the room lessened. “Sorry, Gwenie,” she apologized, her voice perfectly level and normal again. 

On Gwen’s other side, Jack stumbled and almost fell. His second was there, wrapping her arms around him, steadying him. As if they hadn’t just had a show down in the middle of the room, power and age swirling around them like cloaks.

“You alright?”

He leaned on his desk and nodded. “Whoa. Headrush. Is it always-“

“Yup.”

“Shit.”

He took a few deep breaths and straightened. “Okay,” he told them, looking at every single member of the team. “You heard her. Two minutes to say goodbye to Owen. Get ready.”

Then he put on the glove and no-one asked what had just happened, what their two leaders had become, what had spoken through them in those terrible, terrible voices. 

They were afraid of the answer.

+

Buffy, standing on the foot of the autopsy table, interrupted the frantic crying and pleading with two calm words. “Two minutes.”

Jack looked up at her, tears and pain raw in his eyes but nodded. Life and Death had a deal. A balance. Something that could not be broken or else creatures like them, impossibilities, would be born. Facts. Fixed points in time and space. Mistakes. Gods. 

He removed his hand from Owen’s head and severed the link he had been feeding the man life through. Owen’s eyes closed.

“Jack,” Buffy said sharply.

He jerked around to face her and snarled, “What?”

“Cut the link.”

“I have!”

They both felt their eyes go wide before their gazes snapped back to Owen’s still form. The link was cut. But something was still feeding him life. 

+

+

**Wonder**

+

“So,” Jack drawled as he sat down next to Buffy on top the Millennium Centre. “That was Death.”

She snorted as she lay back to take in the stars. “That was copyright infringement.”

“You think so? It might have been the Grim Reaper.”

“And what am I? Chopped liver?”

“A Physical manifestation of a universal constant, born through resurrection, stuck beyond the end of all things.”

“Cheery,” She decided, reaching out to take his hand. “You put a lot of thought into this.”

“I’ve been trying to come up with an explanation for the others. They need to know eventually and today was a close call.”

“Thank the gods for the mass murdering distraction then. How’s Owen?”

“Feeling useless and asking for you again. It’s funny how he clings to you, you know?”

She snorted and shook her head. Owen had clung to her ever since he had come back from the dead, instinctively seeking out the closest thing he could get to true death. As a result he acted like a toddler with his favourite toy. A Buffy shaped toy.

“They won’t be distracted forever. Today we got too close. They’ll ask questions when things have calmed down. When they have time to think again.”

He sighed quietly into the night and lay down next to her, pulling her body into his, covering them both with his coat as they watched the immovable stars above. Endless, but still more finite than the two creatures watching them from so far below. 

“I’m scared,” Jack said, a whisper of breath in her hair.

“Me, too,” she answered and scooted closer, held on to him tighter.

+

Elsewhere Ianto sat, watching the CCTV footage of Buffy’s and Jack’s fight in the office before all hell had broken loose. He listened to their strange distorted voices, their stilted arguments, and wondered what his lovers really were. 

+

 

+

**Space VII**

+

Ianto was happily walking home after a long day at work when he heard it. A strange noise. He had a free evening because Buffy was up to her chin in unfinished paperwork and Jack had taken Owen Weevil hunting in a rather transparent attempt to help the man adjust to being a sleepless quasi zombie. That meant he had the entire evening to himself. He could watch whatever he wanted on telly, eat whatever he wanted and do whatever he wanted.

He loved both Buffy and Jack, of course he did, but they were both forces of nature and occasionally, he felt a bit swept away by them. So, evening off. Until he heard that strange noise. Just his luck.

He could have walked past. Really. It was his night off and if it was dangerous, someone would come to check it out. Except. Except he was Torchwood and Torchwood was not a job but a way of life. 

So, sighing audibly, he drew his gun, stuffed it into the pocket of his coat and turned to check out what was causing the strange whirring noise.

It was a box. A blue, wooden box. 

_Uh-oh._

He’d read the reports. He’d heard the stories. He’d seen the box the night Jack had come back. He knew who that was. And then the door opened and the Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS, wearing a suit and converse and a coat and mad hair and vibrating with energy even from ten feet away.

He patted down his coat, spun twice in a tight circle, picked up something from the ground, frowned at it and flung it back down, muttered to himself, patted down his coat again, knocked on the mad hair and then finally noticed Ianto standing there, feeling a bit cheated by the fact that one of the greatest minds in the universe was obviously seriously disturbed.

“Oh,” the Doctor said.

“Doctor,” Ianto said.

The alien’s face split into a wide grin as he jerked one arm up, pointing at Ianto with a very pointy finger. “You!”

“Me?”

“Yes! You! You’re the mad duo’s Ianto Jones, aren’t you, Ianto Jones?”

“Mad duo?” Ianto carefully eased his hand off the gun in his pocket. The man seemed mostly harmless. Well, _physically_ harmless. He wasn’t sure about the rest. Neither of his two lovers had ever mentioned that the man was so… bright.

“Oh, hold on. Jack’s disappeared on you already, hasn’t he? Because if not, then she landed me in the wrong year _again_ …” he trailed off to glare at his TARDIS with such intensity that Ianto felt compelled to quickly shake his head.

“No, sir. Jack left and came back already. May I ask why you are here?”

“Of course, of course. I’m here for you, Ianto Jones!”

Mentally, the young man was rattling off all reports Torchwood had on the Doctor, trying to remember if kidnapping was something the man indulged in, generally. Something must have shown on his face because the alien hurried to assure him, arms waving, “Not like that, goodness. Jack and Buffy sent me to talk to you because apparently I already have, which means I am currently avoiding a paradox. Funny, thing, paradoxes. Tingle, too.”

It took Ianto a moment to work out what the man was saying before he tentatively asked, “So you are from the future and the Captain and Buffy sent you back to tell me something, sir?”

“Exactly. They said you were bright. Sure I can’t lure you away from the two of them for a quick spin in the old girl?” He patted the TARDIS’ door, his earlier ire already forgotten.

“Sorry, sir. You have a message for me, sir?”

The Doctor waved one hand in the air and pulled a face. “Not a message per se. More of an… explanation. About what they are.”

“What they are?”

“Oh you know,” another grand gesture with both arms, “The voices, the strange conversations, the not dying?”

Oh. That. Yes, he knew. So Buffy and Jack had sent the Doctor to Ianto in their past to explain things because they apparently knew that that was what they had done before. After. Whatever. Time travel. 

On the one hand he wanted to be mad at his lovers for not explaining things themselves but then their reasoning was circular and thus not really their fault. Besides, it seemed of the three of them, the Doctor was the one who was best with words, if his prattling on was anything to go by. And least likely to try and distract Ianto from a serious conversation by taking off clothes.

So, with a very decisive movement, he jammed his gun deeper into his pocket and asked, “Would you like some tea while you explain, sir?”

+

Hours later, long past midnight, Ianto heard the door to his flat open and close, heard two sets of almost soundless footsteps, heard clothing rustle as they stripped each other and then felt the bed dip as first Jack and then Buffy crawled in. It was a bit of a tight fit, three grown people in one bed, but Buffy was small and Jack was like a living, breathing vine anyway, so they made do. And Ianto liked having them close.

He waited until they had both settled in before saying, “The Doctor dropped by for a visit earlier.”

Jack tensed and Buffy giggled. “Since there is no blue box parked in the living room, I’m assuming he came for you?”

“Yup.”

“What did he want?”

“He told me things. About… Life. And Death.” He could hear the capitals as much as he saw them in his mind’s eye.

This time, both of them went very still and tense, like dogs waiting to be kicked.

“He did?” Jack asked after a very long minute of silence and darkness. 

“Yes. I would have rather heard it from the horse’s mouth, but the story was very interesting nonetheless.”

He enjoyed leaving them hanging like this, just a tiny bit. Just for another minute. For once, he was the one who knew things and not the silly, mortal twenty-something boy they loved and indulged, for some crazy reason.

“And are you… angry?”

Silence again.

“He called you ‘physical manifestations of universal inevitabilities’,” he finally murmured into Buffy’s hair, apropos of nothing. “I like calling you Buffy and Jack better.”

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, they relaxed.

+

+

**Marry**

+

It was early when Toshiko knocked on the door of the Bride Suite, half hidden behind a giant bouquet of white lilies and roses. One of the bridesmaids let her in and watched as she rid herself of the flowers and then hugged Gwen tightly. 

Gwen returned the hug before pointing at the flowers and asking, “Who are they from?” The knowing lilt in her voice was not lost on any of the women in the room.

Toshiko blushed, looked around and then discreetly eyed the door. The bride, getting the hint, sent all her maids on various errands, until the two were alone. Then Tosh sat down on a chair, sighed smiled weakly and said, “From all of us. As an apology. I’m the only one who can make it today.”

“Oh no!” Gwen lamented, wide eyed. “What’s happening?”

“Buffy’s pregnant.”

“What?!” Everyone on the floor probably heard that cry but no-one came to check. Tosh, in an attempt to distract Gwen from getting into full work-mode stood and pulled a white envelope from the bouquet, handing it to the other woman.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

Gwen dug a nail under the flap and pulled it open, pulling out a card in bright pink and white. She grimaced, having received enough congratulations cards in the past few days to last her a lifetime. Opening it, she found Jack’s handwriting proclaiming that her honeymoon had been extended by a week and Torchwood was paying for it. Or rather, the team was, judging by the signatures on the bottom.

She jumped to her feet, feeling teary eyed yet _again_ and hugged Toshiko tightly. “Thank you. Everyone.” She took a step back, smile falling, “And now tell me why the hell Buffy’s pregnant?”

A sigh. “She got bit by a shapeshifter last night. It transferred its eggs into her. At least, that’s what Owen says. Jack and Ianto aren’t much use. She’s in the Hub, they’re running tests, trying to find out if they can cut the egg out without risk to Buffy. The fact that she’s getting very hormonal all of a sudden isn’t helping. I’m honestly glad I got away from there. They’re all going mad.”

Gwen relaxed. Buffy would be alright. After all, there wasn’t much that could harm the woman, much less do lasting damage to her. And once the angle of prospective death and mayhem fell away, well, the idea of Jack and Ianto trying to pacify a hormonal, pregnant Buffy while Owen chased her with his equipment made for a rather nice mental image. 

One that would get her through many boring, long nights in the future. 

She giggled and before long, Toshiko joined her. Aliens, invasions, end of the world and madness. That was Torchwood. 

+

+

**Miss**

+

Insomniac as Buffy and Jack were, once they were asleep it took lethal danger to wake them up. After half a year with both of them, Ianto was used to getting up first on the rare nights they all actually _slept_. 

He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as he started mentally going over all the things that needed to be done before they could leave the Hub and hopefully join Gwen’s wedding without a minor apocalypse. Rolling to his feet he pulled on a soft pair of jeans – he had not been born in a suit and he did not wear them around the clock either – and padded into the kitchen of Buffy’s spacious apartment to put on coffee. 

He puttered around a bit as he waited for the machine to finish, unloading the dishwasher, putting away dishes. After maybe fifteen minutes the coffee proclaimed itself finished and he poured three cups to try and raise the immortal dead in the bedroom.

He made his way down the short hall, tray held in one hand, pushing open the door with the other. He looked toward the bed, expecting to find two sleeping lumps under the blankets and instead found – 

\- it was only reflexes that allowed him to keep the tray steady as he took in the sight in front of him. Buffy. Lying on her back, wearing only knickers, the blanket kicked down to her calves. With her stomach protruding from her small frame like a beached whale.

She met his gaze steadily and asked, very calmly, “Why the hell am I nine months pregnant?”

That woke up Jack who rolled over, ready for his morning snog only to place a hand on his lover’s protruding belly and fall out of bed in surprise. 

“Alien,” Buffy supplied, still staring at her stomach, paying no mind to Jack’s pained grunt. “Got to be.”

“Why?” Ianto found himself asking, flinching as soon as the word had left his mouth. Aside from the fact that the blonde had gone to bed looking like she needed to be fed a good meal and woken up very, very pregnant, there was a whole different elephant hiding behind his stupid question. Neither of the three had ever brought up the subject of children before and Ianto was sure that, without the Rift’s annoying alien intervention, they never would have. 

Except. Pregnant girlfriend in bed. She grimaced a smile at him and answered gently, “Aside from the obvious? I can’t have kids. Too old. All the little eggs have gone South a long time ago.”

She was three hundred years old. She had died hundreds of times. They fought aliens for a living. There was never going to be a baby. Never could have been. Ianto knew that. Well, his head did. He had seen Buffy naked a thousand times, had caressed that plane between her hipbones, flat with muscles meant to fight, to hunt, to kill. Death. Not Life. But seeing her now, that hollow filled with something that looked so very right, a world of possibilities yawned in his face and he knew his expression was one of acute loss. 

All those possibilities. All those children that would never, could never be. His head knew that. His heart apparently hadn’t.

Then Jack finally regained his composure and, without taking his eyes off Buffy’s stomach – as if it might jump him from behind if he did – reached for his phone and speed dialled.

“Owen,” he barked into the phone after a moment, “Grab Tosh and get her to the Hub now. Prep the med bay.”

Then he hung up, blinked very slowly and, put-upon, said, “Honey, I think you got a bun in the oven.”

+

Apparently even fake alien pregnancies made a woman’s hormones go haywire, because by the time they left her apartment fifteen minutes later, Buffy was still abusing Jack verbally and physically for his joke. The fact that she was forced to wear sweat pants and a t-shirt of Jack’s didn’t sit too well either and Ianto wisely made himself scarce by bringing round the car the moment he managed to escape, glad that neither of the two seemed to have noticed his minor breakdown in the bedroom.

He drove while the other two sat in the back, Jack using his wrist strap to run preliminary scans on the blonde. 

“Well,” he announced after a few minutes, “Congrats. It’s an alien egg.” If he found the situation anything but mildly amusing he was hiding it well.

Buffy made a noise that was half huff, half snort and commanded, “Kill me,” before shoving Jack into the far corner of his seat and lying down with her head in his lap, her belly seeming to float above her impossibly small frame. Involuntarily, Ianto found his gaze drawn to the domestic scene and for a moment met his boss’ eyes in the rear view mirror.

He was smiling but after almost two years working with the older man, Ianto knew better than to believe that smile. Now that Buffy’s eyes were closed and she couldn’t see it, something like sorrow passed over the Captain’s face.

This one hit a bit too close to the things they had always kept buried safely.

+

+

**See**

+

When Owen entered the Hub to find a very pregnant second in command sitting on the examination table of the med bay he thought, for a moment, that he was still at home in bed, dreaming. Only that was impossible because he was dead and didn’t sleep anymore. So this had to be real. Bollocks.

Teaboy was off making coffee for the masses after equipping Toshiko with flowers and sending her off to Gwen’s big day and the Captain was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, looking forbidding and worried and a bit mad around the eyes. 

Owen snapped on his gloves and started fiddling with a scanner, remarking, “Must have been one hell of a night.”

Buffy growled, Jack flinched and Ianto, coming down the stairs armed with three mugs, looked like someone ate his puppy. Open mouth, insert foot. 

He ran the basic scans and took samples, coming to the same conclusion as Jack. Alien egg, about to pop in approximately six hours. Contracted through the bite of the mysterious shapeshifter the night before. Which meant it really had been one hell of a night and now he had to cut open the body to try and figure out what exactly they were dealing with.

For some reason he’d thought he’d end up saving lives as a doctor, not doing regular autopsies on things with fangs and tentacles. 

+

An hour later he took a break to go and get a refill for his coffee. He couldn’t drink it, mind you, but if he kept it close to where he worked, he could smell it. And having a mug to carry around made him feel that much more normal. 

He found Buffy laid out on the couch, pressing both hands against the small of her back and wailing, “I want pickles. I _hate_ pickles!”

He considered telling her that he had once loved pickles and now couldn’t have any but refrained, throwing her a nasty smirk instead. Seeing the unflappable mistress of snark out of sorts had therapeutic value.

He made his way past her, up to the conference room where the coffee was to be found. The unlucky spouses were both hiding out at the far end of the table, ostentatiously working on trying to figure out what their girlfriend was going to spawn but really just avoiding being near her. 

They both got that glassy look in their eyes when they saw her and more than once in the past hour, Owen had seen them reaching out, as if to touch, to help. They all knew Buffy was carrying alien spawn but somehow, parts of them hadn’t caught on to that.

He understood it, in a way. He’d never planned to have kids. Seriously, he’d have made a lousy father, even before Torchwood. But now he was dead and he never _would_ have kids. And that was an entirely new level of certainty. It was a choice taken from him.

Never know what you got till it’s gone, right?

And now here they were, three warriors for the fight to defend the planet, and the universe was rubbing their nose in what would never be. It sucked. He could admit that. Even if not out loud.

He refilled his mug and strolled back downstairs to find that Buffy had propped herself up and was glaring at her stomach sullenly. Out of the three of them, she was taking this best. Probably had to do with hormones. Maybe he could make her cry?

Nah, the boys would kill him for good then. 

She jerked her head toward the stairs and asked, “They done hiding yet?”

“I don’t think so, darling.”

“They hate this, don’t they?”

He looked deeply into his cup for a moment before simply saying, “Yeah.”

She sighed, tearing her gaze away from her middle and glancing up at him. “It’s not fair on them. This whole thing smacks too much of domesticity.” She grinned at the last word, as if it was some private joke, but didn’t elaborate.

Owen, cursing the fact that for some reason he was always more honest with her than any of the others – especially since dying, offered “Not fair on you either.”

She shrugged and tried to shift into a more comfortable position. “I was fifteen when I was told that I probably wouldn’t live to get my driver’s license. Kinda ruined my plans for the picket fence. I’ve had a long time to get over it. But the boys…”

“It’s a possibility, presented and taken,” the doctor found himself saying without meaning to. When had he gotten so maudlin? Maybe the lack of sleep was getting to him despite being dead. He frowned at himself but met Buffy’s gaze and found that for once, they perfectly understood each other.

Then the door of the conference room was flung open and Jack came trampling down the stairs, “Spawn has a mommy! Tourist office. Owen get your gun, Buffy, don’t you dare move!”

Their moment broken, Buffy and Owen still took a second to quirk grins at each other before the doctor ran off to kill a shapeshifter.

+

+

**Learn**

+

A week after Jonah and finding Jack’s refuge on the island, Gwen was still depressed. She barely spoke and her expression was hollow at the best of times. Jack was quiet, too, but his quiet stemmed from knowing that he had been right and deriving no pleasure from it. 

There were things that were best left alone. He had tried to keep Gwen from them because he knew she couldn’t deal with them and she had tried to prove him wrong. Tried and failed. 

Buffy knew that Jack would gain no satisfaction from saying ‘I told you so’, so she took it upon herself to intervene and try to set their moping team member straight. 

She kept Gwen behind with some inane paperwork while Jack sent the others home early and then removed himself to Ianto’s flat for the night, leaving the two women alone inside the Hub. 

They worked silently next to each other until, after half an hour of aborted small talk attempts, the older woman had enough. She snatched Gwen’s pen from her fingers in mid-sentence and grabbed her hand, pulling her to her feet. It was a sign for how messed up the brunette was that she let herself me manoeuvred across the Hub with nary a protest.

Gwen followed her around the Rift manipulator and up the stairs onto the cat walk across from Jack’s office where, next to the painting of a red dragon, willy nilly writing covered the grey wall. It was a list of sorts, albeit an untidy one. Handwriting and size differed greatly and the only thing implying anything like order were the numbers in front of each statement. The biggest statement on the wall was the one marked number one.

_We do not mess with the Rift_ , it said. Added underneath in slightly smaller writing was the addition, _No, really. We don’t._

Both were spelled out in Jack’s handwriting, the second part added after the Abbadon disaster. It was the first rule of Torchwood, written on what Jack had declared the Rule Wall shortly after taking over from Alex. Buffy had been there, holding his hand, as he added the second rule with tears in his eyes.

_We are ready. Never doubt that._

Many, many more rules had been added since then, some serious, some joking. Buffy found rule number six - _We do not engage in any sort of sexual activity with prisoners, Gwen_ \- and tapped it with a finger. It had been added by Owen the very same day Jack had taken the former PC up here for the first time, to show her the wall. With black marker she had added _Funny_ and her initials in her loopy handwriting. 

The Rule Wall was a good thing. It reminded them of their mistakes and that they learned from them. Tonight, it would remind Gwen of a few things. Buffy let go of the other woman’s hand in front of the wall and pointed at rule four, spelled out in choppy capitals.

_Let the dead stay buried._

Then she pointed again, number seventeen. _LET THE DEAD STAY BURIED,_ added after Suzie’s return to the living. 

Buffy traced the words with a single digit before leaning against rules twenty through twenty five and looking at Gwen with a hard expression. “It’s not just literal, you know. There are things that should stay buried, Gwenie. Things better left untouched. You have to learn to let those things go because if you don’t, people get hurt. People get hurt every time.”

“You think I don’t know that? Rub it in, will you?!”

“I’m not trying to rub anything anywhere. I’m telling you to let things go. You shouldn’t have looked for Jonah after Jack told you not to. You should have let the refuge stay buried. You didn’t. You messed up. And I know you. I know that you’re trying to come up with a way to fix things. But you can’t. Let it stay buried. Stop poking at wounds, Gwen. _Let it go._ ”

Uncharacteristically, Gwen remained silent instead of jumping the gun and yelling as she usually did. She just stood there, her gaze fixed on the five words Buffy had just traced, mind a million miles away.

“How do you do it?” she finally asked after what seemed forever. At the other woman’s curious expression she elaborated, “How do you just walk away from things? How can you?”

She didn’t understand. Honestly didn’t understand how anyone could see a riddle, a problem, a question and not want to find the solution to it. She just couldn’t. Wanting to help, wanting to fix things was as much a part of who Gwen Williams was as the gap in her teeth and the way she rolled her eyes.

“You learn eventually,” came the quiet answer. “Learn that raising the dead hurts more than burying them.”

Gwen seemed to turn the concept over in her mind for a bit before she suddenly shook her head, sending her dark hair flying. “No. I can’t accept that. I can’t just walk away. I refuse.”

Buffy looked at her long and hard but found no crack in her resolve, no doubt. In a way she had to admire the younger woman for her bravery. She knew that she had hurt people, hurt herself badly with her curiosity, her inability to let things go. But she still preferred that hurt over inaction. 

It was almost as noble as it was stupid.

The blonde pushed away from the wall, taking a step forward to lean on the railing and survey the Hub. Above their heads, Myfanwy was singing her scratchy song but everything else was silent. Gwen, too, was quiet, but her silence had lost the sullen, hurt note and turned to determination. It wasn’t what the slayer had been aiming for, but it was better than depression.

Buffy didn’t look at her team mate as she spoke the verdict. “Then you’ll just have to learn to live with the pain.”

“Yeah,” Gwen agreed after a minute. “Yeah.”

+

+

**Time VII**

+

Emily was sitting behind her desk, regal and straight-backed. Alice was standing next to her, Charles leaning against a wall not too far from the women.

All three of them were staring hard at the small blonde standing on the other side of the desk. Hands held loosely at her sides, stance relaxed, head held high, she looked like she was at a tea party rather than an interrogation. Harkness, damn him, was leaning against the far wall, smiling smugly, arms crossed over his chest.

“I beg your pardon?” Emily finally demanded, her voice tight and sharp.

Harkness bit back a laugh as the blonde simply repeated, “I want to work for you. Same conditions as Jack.”

Her American twang was sharper than Harkness’, less smooth. Not made for sweet talking but for stating facts. Emily wasn’t impressed.

“Why would I give you a job?”

“Because without me, your two tin soldiers over there would be dead?” she asked, slowly, completely sure of herself. And Alice remembered her standing in that alley, watching the aliens they had been hunting burn, her face empty and the glint in her eyes speaking of amusement.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. We have no need for another field agent.”

Alice was sure the conversation was over now, but Harkness still grinned and the blonde wasn’t moving. “Oh, I think you misunderstand. I’m not begging you for a job. I am telling you how things are. Because if you don’t give me what I want, I will go out there and I will steal your little toys from right under your noses. I will hide the aliens you want to kill and I will teach them exactly who it is that hunts them. I will bring your little club to its knees and the next time you and yours are in mortal danger, I’ll stand back and feed on your deaths.”

Silence filled the office as Emily stared straight ahead, battling the impulse to scream at the arrogant slip of a girl in a torn dress. Alice and Charles didn’t move, barely breathed because unlike their boss, they had seen the woman fight and they knew that her threat was not empty.

When it looked like Emily was going to speak, hard faced and narrow-eyed, Harkness finally stepped forward. He wrapped a loose arm around his companion’s waist and bent forward across the desk, as if speaking in confidence.

“That’s not a threat, you know, sweetcheeks? It’s a promise. I’ve seen her bring down entire empires because someone stepped on her foot. I wouldn’t try pissing her off.”

“Hello,” the blonde suddenly complained, her tone completely changed, “Still right here.”

Harkness rolled his eyes and shot her a smile that was smaller but somehow more honest than his usual expression. “Sorry.”

As one they both turned back to Emily, looking at her with birdlike eyes, giving the impression that, if necessary, they would spend the next decade right there, just looking and waiting. 

Emily, angry beyond belief, hurt in her pride and enraged, was also scared. The matter of fact voice the threat – promise – had been delivered in, the happy-go-lucky way Harkness had confirmed it, were chilling. Even if one hadn’t seen either of them fight, even if you believed them to be just an eccentric couple of Americans, you couldn’t help but take them seriously. 

They were the kind of people that spoke the truth because they didn’t need to lie. The facts were terrible enough. 

Emily nodded and waved her hand dismissively, trying to regain some of her lost power over the situation. “Tomorrow, same time as Harkness then. I have no doubt he will bring you right along, bright and early.” 

It was a final slur, intended to insult the woman’s virtue, but from the look on both the Americans’ faces, it failed to meet its mark. Utterly. 

As one the duo turned and made to leave the office before Charles suddenly pushed off the wall and called after them, “As archivist, I have to ask. Your name, please.”

The woman stopped and quirked a smile over her shoulder, telling him, sotto voce, “The Slayer. Call me the Slayer.”

+

+

**Bury**

+

She followed. Of course she did. Stupid, goddamned bitch, Hart thought as he watched her walk out of the trees like she was taking a walk in the early afternoon sunshine. 

Like she hadn’t just followed him and Jack across two thousand years to something that looked damn close to the dawn of time. Like she hadn’t just watched future Cardiff get blown to bits by his bombs. Like he wasn’t standing above a hole – a grave – that had Jack inside, immortal and about to be condemned to eternal death. 

Like everything was alright and none of them had committed sins beyond human comprehension. Gray watched her come closer with that glint of fascination and disgust on his face that Hart had learned too late to understand. But now that he did, he knew exactly what the other man was thinking. Another Time Agent. Another tool, if he played his cards right. More cannon fodder. As if John hadn’t already caused enough damage all on his own. 

She kept her hands loosely by her sides as she came closer, halting between the two men, peering into the hole like it was a tourist attraction.

“Jack,” she said when she saw who lay at the bottom. John could not interpret her tone.

“Buffy,” Jack said from the bottom of his grave, smiling shrewdly up at the three people staring down at him. Lover, friend, brother. 

“Do you-“ she asked, her voice even, serene, but with an edge under it. It was the edge of a soldier asking permission to do something painful. 

She was cut off. “No.”

They stared at each other unblinkingly for a long while before she nodded and turned, looking at Gray with nothing in her eyes. “So you’re the little brother that ruined Jack.”

Eyes narrowed at the accusation. “Ruined him? He ruined me.”

She shrugged. “That’s the thing about younger siblings. You do your best, give them everything you have, and they still want more. Gets you every time.”

Gray growled low in his throat and hefted his big ass knife higher, threatening. Buffy dismissed him like he was a bug, turning back to Jack. For the first time in his life, John didn’t mind that Jack was always the centre of attention. He understood. You had to love Jack. Even if you hated him. 

“Are you sure, Jack?”

“Leave him,” the Captain ordered, dirty and trapped and more at peace that he had ever been.

“Eros,” Buffy accused him, no heat in her voice. The desire to live.

“Thanatos,” he returned in the same tone. The wish for death. 

They shared a smile and a look that no mortal could ever understand and then the blonde turned to the long lost brother and commanded, “Do your worst. Punish your brother for something he had no power over.”

When the knife came down, she did not flinch. When she slumped over the blade and Gray pulled it away, took away her support, leaving her to crumble, she did not beg. When John knelt next to her, held her, desperately tried to think of a way to save her, she smiled. 

When Gray picked her up and flung it into the grave on top of his brother, her dead body made no sound. 

“Change of plans, brother,” he snarled. “Now you won’t choke on dirt but on the rotting pieces of your lover.” He turned to John, eyes alight with brilliant madness. 

“Bury him.”

And to his eternal shame, John did. He buried the only man that had ever seen more than a crazy con man in him, buried the woman that had looked at him in a hallway half a year ago and seen a man worthy of…. something. He buried a man that could not die and a woman who would rot for two thousand years on top of him.

And he buried a piece of himself, a part of his blackened, shrivelled soul with them because this was not how it was supposed to go. It was fun and games, cons and lies. Not this. Not this… cruelty. Not this madness.

But John had always loved life more than anything else and the bomb strapped to his wrist made sure he did as he was told. He couldn’t help it. He wanted – needed – to live. He was too scared of what came after. And the worst part was that Jack understood, nodded, gave him permission with tears in his eyes and a dead friend lying on his chest.

Eventually, the hole was filled.

+

+

**Choke**

+

Darkness.

Pain.

Tight. 

Gasp.

Close. 

Cold. 

The smell of dirt apple shampoo. Hair tickling his nose and soil filling it immediately after. 

Choking, breathing it in, filling his lungs, killing him.

Darkness.

Pain. 

Tight. 

Gasp.

Close, so close. 

And so cold.

Above him, something stirred and in the tiny space between them, Buffy moved and Jack remembered who he was. How many times had he died already in the dark? How many times had Buffy? This was the first time they were conscious at the same time and god, god, why was she here with him? She should have run, should have left him to be buried.

Stupid girl, stupid, loyal woman, promising to follow him to the end of the universe and _meaning_ it.

Goddamn, wonderful, crazy – 

Darkness. 

Pain. 

Tight.

Gasp.

Close.

“We have to get out of here.”

Darkness.

Pain.

Gasp.

“Have to move. Can you break those cuffs?”

“I think – “

Darkness.

Pain.

He was so cold. The ground around them was frozen.

How long had they been here? 

How many deaths already?

Darkness.

Buffy hummed close to his ear and then the dirt filled him up again.

Darkness.

Gray’s plan had two flaws. Two, tiny, unimportant flaws. Burying Buffy with Jack was the first. And the second was assuming that Jack didn’t adjust.

He didn’t know that there were two heartbeats that slowed, slowed, slowed, two pairs of lungs that barely moved, eventually. He didn’t know that life and death were buried together in this grave, beyond time and age, beyond the trappings of mortal life. Didn’t know that Jack was not a freak of nature but a god.

Gods don’t die. They only sleep.

And their hearts beat with the slow, steady rumble of the ages.

Darkness.

+

+

**Whisper**

+

The chains broke, eventually. And with infinite slowness and patience, Buffy slipped down Jack’s body until he could move his arms. 

He started digging, pushing hands full of dirt to the side, away, packing the soil around them tighter. Creating space. Sometimes it caved in. Sometimes he could move his torso an inch or two upwards.

They stopped when the ground was frozen solid. 

And no matter how many times Buffy told him he was stupid, he refused to let her turn around so she faced upward, too. Facedown she asphyxiated. Face-up like him, she would choke on the dirt filling her lungs. It took hours now, hearts and lungs slowed to a crawl that was barely noticeable anymore, but it happened. And he could spare her that much at least.

At the speed of glaciers, they moved, the dirt above them packed so tightly he sometimes thought to just give up and let the world forget he ever existed. It was his punishment, the just rewards for leaving his brother, for giving up the search, for not being fast enough and strong enough and smart enough.

He deserved this.

But Buffy didn’t. 

He tried to make the last thing he whispered in their tomb the same three words always, before every death. 

“I love you.”

+

Above, in a world of grass and trees and ice, people huddled in huts, around smoky fires, close together to keep out the cold. They sang and told stories, keeping each other warm and focused and alive. 

Safe.

But as night eclipsed the world, they fell silent and although they never spoke about it in the light of day, they all heard it.

The heart that thrummed beneath their feet, slow and steady and there for as long as they could remember. Drums in the night, the rumbling heartbeat of gods.

+

+

**Sleep**

+

It was useless.

The soil above them accumulated faster than they could dig and even in the most optimistic of estimations they had been down here for a mortal age.

Buffy was curled into his chest as well as she could be, the darkness and cold and weight of the world pressing in from all sides.

_I’m tired, Jack._

She had long since stopped using her mouth to speak, her voice now a memory of sound inside his head.

_I know,_ he answered, knowing she would hear.

_Can we sleep now?_

_You don’t want to get out?_ A trick question because he, too, was too tired to even try anymore. What did it matter? He could lay here for a million years and it would mean nothing. 

What came back from her was not an answer in words, but rather a complex tumble of emotions and images that spelled out exhaustion. Exhaustion and a question. _What’s better above where we never change and everything dies?_

“Sleep,” he whispered into her matted, dirty hair.

And they did.

+

The drums slowed and eventually, as people grew more knowledgeable of the world, they forgot about the gods in the deep. 

If they heard the heartbeat of those sleeping below, they ignored it as superstition.

+

+

**Lull**

+

There was an old park in Cardiff, filled with tall trees and old grass. People who rested on a bench or spent their Sunday on a picnic blanket, who were very still and quiet, sometimes felt something move beneath their feet.

It was a lulling sound, infinitely slow and steady, a throb of the heart of the world. 

Many people never noticed. But those who did stopped for a while, closed their eyes and listened, wondering if maybe there was more to this world than they knew or understood.

+

+

**Plead**

+

In 1904, a Cardiff native published a small collection of poems that dealt with strange gods from below and the heartbeat of the endless. 

People who bought the book read it and maybe remembered an afternoon spent lazing about in the sun. They looked at each other, sneakily, out of the corner of an eye, and found a kindred soul. Another who had heard.

And their whispers carried across decades, telling of what slept below their beloved, cursed city, waiting to rise. Building myth on the grave of Life and Death.

+

+

**Pass**

+

In the early nineties young Ianto Jones listened to his grandmother telling him old stories of guardian angels sleeping below the foundations of the city. He rolled his eyes and humoured her. 

She was old. 

And she always stuffed a few pound notes into his hand when he left again. He wanted to see the new Terminator film.

+

An older and perhaps wiser Ianto Jones returned home from London with the knowledge of impossible things and horrors filling his head and heart. He remembered the old stories and sometimes, at night, he wondered what monsters were at the root of them.

Wondered if they turned girls into machines, too. 

He wasted no more thought than that on the matter.

+

After Lisa was gone, Ianto had time to sit still for the first time in a long while. He visited his grandmother, for no other reason than that she was known in a world of unknowns.

“Sit,” she told him as he entered her den, patting the sofa next to her. He sat.

“Listen,” she said and for the first time, he heard what she had heard all her life. 

He heard the city’s heartbeat.

+

Sometimes, when he sat outside at night, just enjoying a moment’s peace, he could have sworn the steady drumbeat was meant for him and only him. To soothe his fears, to calm his nightmares. To show him that there were better things yet to come.

+

After Gray had locked them into cells and gone to destroy everything they loved, Ianto sat down on the dirty floor, put his face on his knees and closed his eyes, listening until he found the beat.

Listening, listening. 

“Please,” he whispered into the fabric of his trousers. “Please.”

He could have sworn the beat hitched for a moment, could have sworn that something, some _one_ was _listening._

+

Below, in the vaults where even Ianto Jones, Archivist, rarely tread, a chamber stood in utter darkness. 

Inside that darkness, something moved.

A hitch.

+

+

**Wake**

+

Below, in the vaults where even Ianto Jones, Archivist, rarely tread, a chamber stood in utter darkness. And in the center of that chamber lay a mound of old military blankets, bolstered with straw that had turned bad over the years, rotting away quietly in the damp room.

On top of that pile, that strange nest, lay two creatures that had been with Torchwood for longer than anyone – or anything – else.

+

In 1901 a woman named Alice had enticed a man named Charles to help her find the source of a strange signal she had found. They traced it to a park and then twenty feet down into the ground.

They dug for almost two days straight until their shovels hit something that was neither hard nor loose, but gave under pressure. Like a body. Like flesh. They dropped their shovels, started digging by hand and found a sight that never left them until the day they both died.

A man and a woman, entwined like lovers lay there, naked. The rotting remains of their clothes fell away as the light touched them and yet – 

\- the bodies were not decayed. They looked, in fact, as if they might still be alive. And, Alice realized with a jolt that almost sent her falling backward, they were _breathing_. 

Charles, as shaken as his partner but better at hiding it, organized for a carriage to pick them and their findings up. They piled the bodies and everything else they found in the hole – grave – into the carriage and took it back to Torchwood.

Once there, they tried to separate the two to no avail. They clung to each other like lifelines. Instead they set about carefully cleaning them, examining them and looking for any clues as to their identity. 

It was Alice who recognized their faces. Harkness and Slayer. The two not-dead bodies they had found under twenty feet of dirt were Harkness and his lady friend. 

That was, of course, impossible. The two of them had been in only this morning, taking on a job in London, moaning under their breaths the entire debriefing long. But there was really no doubt about it. 

+

Emily had gone with them to London, to supervise them, officially. Unofficially, she just didn’t trust them as far as she could throw them. That gave Alice and Charles a week to figure out what was going on.

Oh, they realized quickly that somehow, the other two agents had crossed their own timelines. What they did not understand was how they had landed in a deep grave, with one heartbeat every other minute, apparently in some sort of stasis without the aid of cryotechnology. 

In the end they decided to do what they had never done before. They decided to break the rules. 

They prepared a sort of bed in the deepest vault, where no-one ever went, and they placed them there, along with clothes and what else they might need, should they ever wake. Then they erased all the records of their two new inmates and their new home. 

By the time Emily returned to Cardiff, there was no trace of two time travelling, dreaming gods anymore.

+

“Please,” the whisper reached them the same way a million others had over the centuries. But this one was different. This one was familiar. The voice, the desperation, the plea. 

Please.

Please wake up.

Please help me.

Please. 

They could not disobey.

They woke.

+

+

**Rise**

+

When the doors to the vaults opened and Gwen, Ianto and John were suddenly free, Ianto’s first thought was that Gray had come back to finish what he started. Killing everything Jack loved.

But then a second ticked by and another and a third and nothing happened. No-one stepped into the cell. No-one screamed. No-one died. Cautiously, Ianto stepped into the hall.

+

John saw them first, his cell the one closest to the door. They walked next to each other, close but not touching, wearing the mismatched rags of a bygone time. Pants and shirts, jackets, no shoes. They were dirt smeared and wild looking, unkempt, unwashed. 

They looked like zombies and John wondered if they were. Jack and his blonde, living forever, zombies for all eternity. And it had been his hands that buried them. 

He felt like crying.

She looked at him in passing, her steps never slowing, never faltering. She walked with purpose, slow and even, not hurried but unstoppable. Jack, too. Under the dirt, their faces were smooth. Peaceful. Shouldn’t they have been screaming and raving?

Two thousand years in the dark, choking, dying. Shouldn’t they have been mad?

+

Maybe, Gwen thought, they were. Maybe wherever they had been had eaten at them until all that was left was the shells of two people she loved. Shells with nothing inside. They walked like machines, breathed and moved and blinked, but there was no-one home.

+

They never stopped walking. 

Past John, past Gwen, past Ianto, looks for all three, and vague smiles. But no words. No comfort, no recriminations, accusations, promises. Nothing. 

They exited the vaults through the back door, taking the narrow winding staircase to the upper levels. 

The others followed.

In the tunnel leading back to the heart of the hub, Buffy stumbled. Jack was there to catch her as he knees just sort of gave out and she fell. He caught her. 

“Owen is gone.” The first words out of her mouth.

Gwen cried and smacked a hand hard over her mouth to keep the scream inside. 

“Jack?” She asked, choking on her tears, needing answers, needing to know, to understand. 

Beside her, Ianto shook his head. “That’s not Jack and Buffy,” he told her, his voice almost as dead as he felt inside.

“What are you talking about?”

John stepped between them, eyes fixed on the couple in front of him which had resumed their silent march. “Thanatos and Eros,” he whispered, eyes hollow. He turned his head, tilting it vaguely to one side and looking at Gwen. “The wish for death,” he told her, “The desire to live.”

Then he took hers and Ianto’s hands in his own blood and dirt smeared ones and led them after their leaders.

+

They knelt on either side of Tosh, holding her with total disregard to the blood that seemed to be everywhere. Gwen choked on another sob and this time it took Ianto to keep her upright.

“Tosh,” she whimpered, half plea, half prayer.

Toshiko didn’t react, even when Ianto’s voice, suddenly frantic, echoed throughout the med bay. “Do something. Save her!”

Jack looked up from the dying woman’s face long enough to shake his head at his lover. “Out of life,” he said, his voice neutral, flat. Like he was explaining the weather.

“Into death,” Buffy finished for him as she smiled at Toshiko, stroking her hair. “I will look after you.”

Tosh returned the smile weakly, tears on her cheeks. She closed her eyes.

Jack exhaled, Buffy inhaled.

Toshiko died.

+

+

**Fall**

+

Time froze in a tableau of blood, death and tears and for long minutes, no-one in the med bay breathed, blinked, did anything but watch as Tosh’s body slid out of Jack’s and Buffy’s blood slicked hands to rest on the cold tiles like it belonged there. 

Jack removed his hands into his lap, not touching the fallen while Buffy bent low and started whispering. Except that Jack would never let go of anyone and Buffy did not talk to dead people. 

Not Jack and Buffy, Ianto had said. Thanatos and Eros. The wish for death. The desire to live. 

Gray’s steps pounded on the silent vigil like a hammer on glass and they all turned to him, rage and helpless fury warring with the loss and grief in their eyes and hearts. 

Life stood and Death followed, each taking opposite stairs to the upper level. Life got there first, head tilted to one side, but it was Death who spoke as she came to a halt in front of the startled man. 

“Poor thing,” she cooed, voice flat, empty. “You’re stuck.”

“Hanging in the doorway,” Life added, taking a step closer to his brother, who was suddenly retreating, all thoughts of fighting back gone from his mind.

“Halfway between here and there.” Another step. 

“Life and Death.” They followed

“They kept you there.” A wall. Gray spun sideways and Life slipped around him like water.

“Hurt you so.” Held on to him from behind, a parody of a hug, but so gentle.

“Left you there.” Death stepped closer still and stroked the brand on his cheek, feather light.

“Broken thing.” Gray was crying as Death stood on tip toes, pressing her lips to his in a kiss that tasted like ice and darkness.

The others stood, frozen in place, watching wide eyed as a hint of black, the unfurling of great wings, shadowed the group of three, arcing upwards. The kiss lasted forever, slow and light, and then life turned to death, carried away on great wings and Gray slumped between them, dead.

Buffy stumbled and it took John tearing himself out of his shock to stop her from falling down the stairs. “Jack,” Buffy said, the god gone from her voice.

Jack jerked, his expression torn between horror and defeat as he lowered his brother to the ground, movements stiff and awkward. 

“Buffy,” he answered, and sank to the floor. 

Ianto fell onto the man, desperate for contact, for life and assurances and Gwen followed, stumbling, blinded by tears. John carried the blonde in his arms up the final steps, knelt next to the huddle of humanity and put her down there, where the others pulled her into their three way hug eagerly. Then the last of his strength – emotional, physical – left him and he landed on his butt on the freezing cold concrete, gaze fixed hollowly on Gray’s still body.

It was over.

+

+

**Time and Space**

+

Two months later, without reason, Buffy and Jack both threw themselves out of Jack’s office with hungry, desperate looks on their faces.

John slipped out from under Toshiko’s work station, abandoning the chaos of wires and switches he had been working on. Simon was still out running errands and Ianto put down his tray. Gwen abandoned her paperwork, all three standing to exchange worried glances.

Their leaders – John’s, too, once and for all after burying them and being forgiven, being held, despite everything he’d done – confused and scared them. They didn’t sleep anymore, Ianto said, barely ate and sometimes moved so, so slowly. Simon checked them over once a week and always came up with the same results. Their hearts beat too slowly, they barely breathed. Inhumanly slow, everything about them was frozen. Jack’s easy laughter had turned to deep, lazy smiles and Buffy’s quips to nothing but a sparkle in her eyes. 

They were getting better, yes, but it seemed they had forgotten how to be human. Everything but the bare essentials was simply gone. John looked down at his hands, at the wicked band of scars on his right wrist and felt shame.

Then a whine like nothing he’d ever heard filled the air and between Buffy and Jack, in the space they had left between them, a blue box appeared, madly blinking light on top.

The man that stepped out of it was tall and skinny, wearing a suit and glasses, an air of endlessness and childish joy about him. Buffy fell on him before he spoke a single word, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, not intending to ever let go. Jack followed suit, curling himself around them both.

“Doctor,” he said and John understood.

“Time,” Buffy corrected and Ianto gasped and leaned on Gwen.

The mandoctorgod laughed. “Now that’s the kind of welcome I like. No running at all!”

He freed one of his arms of Buffy’s tight embrace and managed to lay it around Jack’s shoulders, completing the hug. Buffy, still not budging, leaned her head against Jack. Buffy touching Jack, Jack touching Doctor, Doctor touching Buffy.

Full circle.

For a moment, John swore, he saw the three of them enveloped in blinding golden light, bright enough to burn a man where he stood. He stepped back, stumbled and landed on his butt next to the tangle of Ianto and Gwen, expressions of awe and fear on their faces. The cog door sounded and Simon, too, stopped in his tracks, falling.

Then the moment passed and the three that stood there in the middle of the hub were people again, creatures of flesh and blood and bone, not light. 

John breathed and forced himself to relax.

From somewhere close by, the sound of a wolf’s howl echoed.

Jack threw his head back and laughed for the first time in forever.

+

Fin

+

**Bonus: The Rules**

+

As written down by Captain J. Harkness, Leader of Torchwood Three

1\. We do not mess with the Rift. No, really. We don’t.  
2\. We are ready. Never doubt that.  
3\. Suzie may be a genius but we do not let her near the coffee machine. Or any other kitchen appliance.  
4\. We do not make applicants strip in order to get a ‘comprehensive picture of their skills’.  
5\. Even if they don’t mind. _Don’t be a bore, Suz. – CJH_  
6\. **We do not order pizza under the name ‘Torchwood’.**  
7\. Same goes for all other orders we make. _It was a joke! - DOH_   
8\. If we spot a blue box anywhere, we tell Jack. _What? – TS  
Just do it, please. - CJH   
Did Jack just say please? – DOH_  
9\. Let the dead stay buried.  
10\. We do not take alien artefacts off the base unless we have the Captain’s permission.  
11\. We do not engage in any sort of sexual activity with prisoners, Gwen. _Funny. –GC_  
12\. We do not call Gwen ‘Cop girl’ just to get a rise out of her.  
13\. Even if it works surprisingly well.  
14\. We do not hide our cybergirlfriends in the basement. _Shut up, Owen. – CJH_  
15\. Ianto is part of the team. He is not the butler.  
16\. We do not feed the Weevils with pizza. We know they can’t digest them, Owen. _That was Tosh. – DOH_  
17\. When Buffy says she has a bad feeling about something, we believe her.  
18\. We do not let Jack take us camping. _I didn’t know there would be cannibals. – CJH_  
19\. We only get to tease people about their mistakes for a week. Longer only if they almost ended the world. _You deserve it. Cannibals, Jack. - GC_  
20\. We do not touch the coffee machine unless we want to face Ianto’s wrath.  
21\. If we come into the possession of alien artefacts, we hand them over to Torchwood immediately. We do not keep them.   
22\. We do not read other people’s minds. That only leads to trouble. _Sorry. – TS_  
23\. We do not use Owen as bait.  
24\. We do not forget that we are using Owen as bait and leave him to fight the Weevil alone.  
25\. **Let the dead stay buried.**  
26\. We do not use retcon to brainwash people.  
27\. We do not ask about the stopwatch.  
28\. We do not lock Owen is the vaults and tell him he won’t get out until he does a strip tease for us, Buffy.  
29\. We do not press buttons because ‘they are shiny’. _Spoilsport. – B_  
30\. We do not mess with the Rift. Even if it is to save people’s lives. Even if those people are Jack and Tosh. We just don’t.   
31\. **WE DO NOT MESS WITH THE RIFT!**  
32\. We do not shoot Jack. _Thank you. – CJH_  
33\. We do not call the Wise and Glorious Emperor of the Seventh Moon of Thulak a ‘tiny green guy’.  
34\. Nor do we giggle at him and hum the ‘War of the Worlds’ theme song every time we see him.   
35\. **Buffy is only allowed to drive in apocalyptic emergencies.**  
36\. There is no need for Kathy to know everything, no matter how many questions she asks.   
37\. We do not drink alcohol from alternate dimensions under any circumstances, ever, at all. _They said it was rum! – DOH_  
38\. We do not leave for longer than a couple of hours without telling anyone where we are going, Jack. _I said I was sorry. – CJH_  
39\. We have faith in Jack.  
40\. **We do not take people for granted. Life is too fragile for that.**  
41\. Owen is not allowed to make more than five teaboy jokes a day. He is not allowed to write them down and save them for later either.  
42\. Buffy is not allowed to use future technology to upload nasty screensavers to Owen’s computer, thus making it impossible for him to remove them. Fair play, children.   
43\. Tosh is not allowed to feed Janet or Myfanwy. At all.   
44\. We do not trust our ex-anythings and we do not let them inside the Hub.   
45\. When Jack tells you not to snog someone, you obey him.  
46\. Actually, we do not snog anything that is not completely human and from Earth. Unless we are Jack or Buffy. They know what they’re doing. _Most of the time. – GC_  
47\. We do not make dirty jokes about Blowfish.   
48\. We do not allow Rhys to keep a scrapbook.  
49\. We do not ask Jack and Buffy about their past. It only leads to tears.  
50\. We do not try to sell CCTV footage of Jack and Ianto having sex on ebay. Nor anywhere else.  
51\. Buffy’s first rule trumps any but the first and fourth Torchwood rule.   
52\. Buffy’s rule: Don’t die.  
53\. We do not cross timelines if we can help it.   
54\. ‘Confidential’ does not mean ‘hack into and learn by heart’.  
55\. The locked room in the archives is locked for a reason and if you try to get in there, you deserve to be zapped.  
56\. ‘Janet made me do it’ is not a legitimate excuse for anything.  
57\. If we get the Captain killed, we buy him dinner.  
58\. If we get Buffy killed, we buy her shoes.   
59\. We do not need to know what happened during those two lost days.  
60\. Neither do we need to know where all the sand in the vaults came from.  
61\. If we spill alien substances on the floor, we clean them up.  
62\. We do not tease Ianto about his diary. _Thank you. – IJ_  
63\. Even though he’s not allowed to take it outside the Hub. Sorry.   
64\. We do not enter alien spacecraft unless we are sure they are empty.  
65\. **We do not poke fun at UNIT members.**  
66\. We do not write ‘Torchwood does it better’ on their reports and send them back. _Ianto. I swear. – DOH_  
67\. We do not use any knowledge gained during time travel to gain an unfair advantage at sporting events.   
68\. Even if we are short on cash.  
69\. Pretending to stumble and pour coffee into Tosh’s keyboard is not funny. _Oh, come on! – DOH_  
70\. Owen is not allowed to proposition Martha more than three times a day.  
71\. **No more gloves. No more mittens. No more resurrections.**  
72\. We do not call Buffy ‘Owen’s Sugar Mommy’, even if he does follow her like a lost puppy.  
73\. We do not scream ‘Brains!’ every time Owen enters the room.  
74\. Neither do we ask, ‘does it smell like something’s dead in here?’ _He deserved it. – IJ,  
Oi, a little respect for the dead!? – DOH_  
75\. Asking Jack to explain how 69 works with three people is rude. _I don’t mind. – CJH  
We do. – GC_  
76\. Nor do we ask for pictures.  
77\. We don’t ask Buffy and Jack about the funny voices. Ianto knows. That’s enough.  
78\. Any and all pregnancy jokes are herewith banned inside the Hub. _And on missions. – B_  
79\. **We still do not let Rhys keep a scrapbook.**  
80\. We do not call anyone’s mother an ugly bitch to her face. _It’s true! – CJH_  
81\. The fact that Ianto caught the bouquet does not mean anything, so stop it, Owen.  
82\. ‘I’m pregnant with an alien baby’ is only a legitimate excuse when it’s true.  
83\. When Jack tells us to leave well enough alone, we do, Gwen. _I can’t, Jack. – GW_  
84\. Jack does not always know best. _Thanks for that, Ianto. – CJH_  
85\. Buffy and Jack are Buffy and Jack. Always.   
86\. We do not ask about the voices.  
87\. We do not blow up half the damn city, John. _Bugger off, Jack. – CJH2_  
88\. The end is where we start from.

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me [here](http://www.wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


End file.
